A musical instrument we made at OxfordHack 2022!

Made by myself, George, and Oli, this is a whiteboard-based musical instrument, using OpenCV in Python. We had three pens, and each colour corresponds to a different octave and instrument.

You can draw lines on the board, and these correspond to notes, which are played back live while you draw. And, if you draw a wavy line, the sound is wavy! It’s actually pretty fun. Hard to make anything that sounds good, but it is possible (see Among Us Drip, below: the first official Music Board single).

This was one of those projects which was completely determined by the random objects we decided to bring with us on the day. I had this big yellow clamp in my bag, and a webcam; and, at University at the time, I was working on a similar computer vision project for my Music & Mixed Reality module. In fact, I was able to steal a lot of the code from this (mostly the webcam streaming and perspective correction).

The project was great fun, and we won, I think quite fittingly, the “What The Hack?!” prize! Have a look at the Devpost submission for a few more photos and a more detailed writeup.