instrument-a-day 14: corn music

I’ve always thought the patterns on corncobs looked like player piano rolls.  So I wrote a program that watches a slowly-turning corncob. Whenever a particularly dark kernel crosses the centerline of the image, it plays a note corresponding to the height.

You can download the Processing code from moonmilk.com/11/02/cornscan.txt.

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3 thoughts on “instrument-a-day 14: corn music

  1. Pingback: With Inventions Mechanical and Whimsical, Artist Ranjit Again Tackles an Instrument a Day

  2. Great stuff. I love the corn piano roll.
    I’m curating a sound show for April 2013 in Lincoln, NE. That piece would work very well.
    I make instruments and perform. Last summer I did a corn based piece in San Francisco at the Lab, part of the Mediate Green Sound Series. I used my instruments to trigger sounds extracted from a piezoed-up corn plant.

  3. Hey, you have the same name (thus how i found you). After seeing your corn, it has me really interested and was wondering if you could play Sweet Child of Mind by Guns’n’Roses on it. I cannot wait for an update on this :D
    Take care man, your my new idol ;)
    Peace out bro

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