The singing tennis ball is an instrument that takes your movement and turns it into sound.

The singing tennis ball is a 1 to 1 conversion of movement to music. This project was inspired by the educational practice of Dalcroze eurythmics. One of the main ideas behind dalcroze is that the body is the first instrument and that movement is music. I took that idea and turned it into a physical reality. This instrument can be used as a teaching tool to show better examples of how movement and music interact with each other or can be used as a performance instrument.

Inside the ball, there are simple 3 components. The first is a gyroscope that can pick up all of your intricate movements. The second is a daisy seed which is like an Arduino made for music that can run off of Max/MSP, the gyroscope data gets sent to this and synthesizes the movement into sound. The last main part is an audio transmitter which can send audio wirelessly to any sound system. 

The sound comes out of the ball and then is processed using Ableton to morph the sound into whatever the performer desires. The ball can send MIDI or audio data either individually or simultaneously.

The singing tennis ball also comes in a variety of sizes ranging from the size of a real tennis ball up to the size of a yoga ball. This is meant to force the performer to embrace different types of movement that will produce different types of gestures.