DIY Synesthesia with Drawdio – Draw Audio!

Imagine you could draw musical instruments on normal paper with any pencil (cheap circuit thumb-tacked on) and then play them with your finger. The Drawdio circuit-craft lets you MacGuyver your everyday objects into musical instruments: paintbrushes, macaroni, trees, grandpa, even the kitchen sink…

Drawdio was developed by Jay Silver of MIT’s Media Lab.

“One day I bought a “harmonium” kit at the street market in Bangalore“, says Silver. “I hacksawed the keyboard off to make the first ever Drawdio circuit. We played with it at a local school in the slums using plants, water, our foreheads, etc. My friend told me graphite would work too.

Meditating on it, I realized the Drawdio circuit should be literally attached to a pencil to “draw audio,” and that’s where the name came from: Draw + Audio”.

The following video shows how the children at Drishya and PICO Crickets both influenced the way Drawdio evolved:

The official Drawdio site is here. Want one? You can get one at Adafruit Industries. I just purchased two of them from there, so look for updates along those lines.