Sound & Colour Synthesiser; Product Overview

Sound & Colour is an audio & visual synthesis device with powerful musical learning and jamming potential. Unlike many commercially available “learner” instruments, Sound & Colour takes an alternative approach to learning music, focusing on allowing the user access to the mathematical concepts and relationships which dictate musicality without having to understand them! It uses an intuitive “harmonic table” layout to provide the user an ergonomic and accessible musical map. This layout places useful musical intervals close together and reduces chord memorisation, meaning all the triads (the backbone of western music) can be played with just two different fingers each with just one finger. It also features a helpful colour changing LED display dispersed across the keyboard. This display helps the user to familiarize themselves with the tonal layout and to navigate the keyboard, instantly locating recognizable intervals through colour recognition. Finally the Sound & Colour features a simple yet powerful sample based synthesis engine. This allows the user to select different sounds and modify them to their taste, without getting bogged down in deep parameter manipulation. It features 8 note polyphony that allows the structure of rich chords and deep melodies and harmonies.

1 of 5

Harmonic Table Layout

One of the key concepts in the design of Sound & Colour and a big part of its intuitive nature is the harmonic table layout which forms its keyboard. This layout is nothing new, dating back to 1739. I discovered this layout early in my research and it has endured the design process. The harmonic table adds ergonomic, functional and user interface benefits due to its geometric symmetry. It clusters important intervals together for easy play and allows playing of chords with a single finger. I found it to be perfect for the vision I had for Sound & Colour. The other major contributing factor is the colour changing RBG LED display. This is designed to guide users around the layout and allow them to navigate in a very musical way (based on interval to colour relationships) for example the user can memorise chords and melodies as combinations of colours as opposed to note location or name.

2 of 5

Prototype Development

Displayed here are some of the physical prototypes I used throughout the development of this project. The prototyping process helped me refine the design through user testing and allowing me to get a physical hands on reperesentation of my design iterations. The LED and MIDI prototypes where particularly useful as they allowed me to visualise and demonstrate the concepts of the design.

3 of 5

Aesthetic Development Through CAD Renders

These renders represent the aesthetic development of Sound & Colour, as well as the development of its interface.

4 of 5

Video Prototype 1 - Fifths

This video demonstrates the harmonic table - travelling vertically increases pitch by an interval of a fifth.

5 of 5

As a student of design and engineering and an amateur musician, learning has been a large part of my life. Learning is a powerful tool, not only for developing our skills and understanding on a topic, but because it comes with a sense of fulfilment, of self-improvement and of joy.

Particularly with musical learning, I often find myself distracted from the recommended learning routes, instead preferring to experiment and play. It took me at least a year of learning guitar before I attempted to tackle a song from start to finish, instead preferring to improvise within simple scales and chords I had attained in bits and pieces. I find that this method is beneficial, as it allows me to express myself more immediately, and ultimately it builds skills, confidence and familiarity with the instrument and theory. This all contributes towards playing more proficiently, in a round-about way, but in the end my personal goal for learning music is not to replicate any particular piece of music but to enjoy myself and express my creativity. In this way I treat learning as a sort of meditation, where the purpose is to lose myself in experimentation and exploration.

Sound & Colour is a project aimed at the casual learner. Music is traditionally taught with some degree of intensity, and while this is unarguably a route to successful musical proficiency, plenty of joy can be gained from simply exploring sound and developing one’s “musicality”. Taking inspiration from childish play, I wanted to design a product that would allow the user to really play around and mess with music without requiring prior knowledge. I put particular focus on how the user interfaces with the device, I wanted to stray away from traditional layouts and daunting “cryptic” musical notation, providing instead a fresh and intuitive interface and feedback system. I placed importance on musical interval relations, using a regular isomorphic layout to provide logical navigation to allow the user to drift around the “keyboard” discovering these interval relations as they relate to each other geometrically.

This project has allowed me to explore this concept of experimental learning within music through my design and engineering skill set, from user interaction and research to digital and physical prototyping, electronics and coding.