Experimenting with how musicians physically interact with an electronic kit is not new but this design for a drum sequencer interface by doctoral student Peter Bennett is just awesome. It’s simple too: each drum effect has a track on BeatBearing’s plastic screen, and by dropping a ball bearing into a hole you activate that track’s effect as a scanning light beam encounters it. When you watch a video of it in action, moving the bearings around in real time is like a kind of weird drum ballet:
https://gizmodo.com/tenori-on-crazy-led-digital-instrument-set-for-septembe-295444
BeatBearing currently only has 4 tracks, so highly complex sequences aren’t really possible. But we do wonder what would happen, flying-ball-bearingly-speaking if you really turned the speed up.
