Taptun. Motion instrument
Six ways to play a phone by waving it about. The accelerometer picks the note, and nothing on screen is hidden from you.
Taptun reads the accelerometer and turns movement into pitch. Move faster and the note climbs; hold still and it resets, so a phrase is a sequence of gestures rather than of taps. It asks for motion permission on the first press, which is why every mode is its own button.
There are six: a plain piano, a drone, a robot, invisible sounds, an eight-bit piano and a theremin — plus a camera mode. They share one engine and differ in what they do with the same numbers.
The instrument is the whole phone, and the fingering is how hard you swing it.
It shows its working
Under the buttons sit the current acceleration, the last note played, the thresholds at which notes trigger, and a switch for showing every event including the noise. Below that is a log you can scroll, clear or save to a file.
That is not a user interface so much as a bench: the readouts are there because getting a phone to play in tune means watching what the sensor actually reports, and it reports a great deal of rubbish. The app was never tidied up afterwards, and the bench is still bolted to the front of it.
More projects