20 years in the making

I tried to start this project back in 1999/2000 when I was living in San Francisco. It was inspired by a piece I saw in the gallery at Cellspace https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=CELLspace.

The piece was a fantastic little music box about 4 inches by 6 inches. It was filled with a microcontroller and all sorts of electromechanical fun. It played a song with no traditional instruments. I loved it but lost track of the artist years ago. I wanted to make something similar, but fill a room not a box.

I started by purchasing 20 or so little speakers from either Weird Stuff https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/08/sjm-l-weirdstuff-0408/ or Halted electronics https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/technology/personaltech/05basics.html.

Unfortunately that’s where it stopped. My skills were not up to the task and tech at the time max it prohibitively expensive and hard to do.

Fast forward 20 years. The Esp32 now exists, everything is cheaper and easier to use. I’m really excited to dig back into the project and start over from scratch.