I was invited to take part in a “flash bento bash” at the Boston Architectural College, celebrating the intersections of Japanese food styling and architectural traditions. For one night local chefs and designers were given bento boxes and told to make a meal for a temporary exhibition.
Read more about the process here: http://continuuminnovation.com/how-to-make-a-musical-jello-box/
I'm a designer, and not a chef, so I knew right away that I wanted my contribution this event to be about physical interaction. Something enticing, surprising, maybe a little creepy, maybe silly. I was inspired by Raphaël Pluvinage and Marianne Cauvard’s wonderful 2012 Noisy Jelly project.
Jello is a beautiful medium! All the aesthetic pleasure of working with amber, glass, or cast resin with none of the expense, toxic chemicals, and fear of failure that these more sophisticated materials bring.
Here’s the setup: An Arduino is connected to a capacitance sensor (Sparkfun's MPR 121). When each Jello is touched an LED lights up and the Arduino sends a serial signal to trigger sounds that will loop until the touch ends.
My wife is a singer, and we’ve collaborated on several other projects based on the human voice. For this one I asked her to just imagine what “sound” Jello might make and then record each note of an eight-note scale in that style.
