An Electronic Engineering Approach for Turning a Lego Brick Piano into a Musical Instrument

Abstract

We demonstrate and reflect on a rebuilding and electronic engineering approach to augment and electrify a Lego brick model. Concretely, we turn the not musically playable Lego Grand Piano into a functioning musical instrument as a MIDI keyboard with 25 keys and a sustain pedal. Our proposed solution is unobtrusive, flexible, and reversible. We only use off-the-shelf components and instead of soldering we take advantage of the bricks’ interlocking mechanism together with wires and self-adhesive copper tape, which also keeps the costs and required skills for our approach low. Two live performances evidenced by videos showed the practical and musical applicability. We created and reflected on an extensive step-by-step documentation of the whole transformation process which we offer for potential reuse purposes. Overall, our approach to electrify a brick-built model and turning it into an interactive musical interface was successful, insightful and has the potential to be expanded, but needs further elaboration with other brick-built models and for different application purposes than musical instruments. Thus, we explicitly invite researchers, designers, engineers, tinkerers and makers who engage themselves in electrified and interactive brick-built models to get inspired by our approach, replicate and advance it.

Keywords

• Electronic engineering
• human–machine systems
• interactive systems
• Lego brick-built models
• digital musical instrument (DMI)
• MIDI keyboard