Texting Cabbage with a Recorder - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

there are 41 whole words that you can text using a recorder the longest of which are cabbage and baggage there's loads of videos of people taking things which aren't Musical and making them musical with the Makey Makey so this weekend we decided we take something that was Musical and make it do something computery this was part of a haakon h Manchester one of the sponsors had a challenge for the most ridiculous use of a texting API and and Paula decided to rig up a musical instrument to a texting API so you have uh you can text with only the musical notes available we have a recorder connected to a Makey Makey which we're using as the input instead of a keyboard into this laptop there's wires connected to each of these finger holes and there's an earth wire connected to the mouthpiece with the Makey Makey you have to be connecting one of those wires and the Earth at the same time to get input into to a computer if you're holding the keys and then you blow into it and connect the Earth you can start typing as you would with the keyboard except it's not a keyboard it's a recorder we numbered each of the holes and then we changed the file on the Makey Makey so that when each of those holes are touched it sends a string through the USB with which holes were being pressed when you touch the Earth so for example we'll send 0 1 and two to the computer cuz with the holes that I had covered that didn't make much of a tun we kept doing it just that way this weekend to not annoy people we send Z one and two because those were the holes I had covered when I pressed the Earth so anyone that actually plays a recorder sorry for my bad recorder ring I'm not a recorder [Music] player Shadows are meant to be different notes the wires have a tendency to come out as you can see they are purely duct taped on bit of a technical issue with the duct tape you're currently pressing notes yeah I know it might work a bit better now see what good is it having so many numbers on there how do you get cabbaged in what happens is that it sends all of the numbers in a string in order you can then write an applet that will let you take that string and switch on a Case statement to say what letter should come from those so we chose to do it so if you played an a then a statement would say you've pressed 0 1 and two and switch that so they would output an a onto the screen instead of showing you 0 1 and two I was thinking you maybe make 0 a 1 B but you're talking about the actual note a is that right yeah because there's eight holes we could have used eight factorial and Had Each one corresponding to a different letter and covered all of the letters and numbers and some punctuation but we thought this way is a bit more ridiculous and you know when you've got a recorder could inct tape it's pretty ridiculous anyway so make it as ridiculous as you can the Makey make is s Arduino it's running Arduino firmware so that has a program on here um in Arduino C which will send the appropriate codes through this is a Java file Java class recorder input and in the recorder input class they have this uh switch statement so switch statement uh they're just recognizing the different notes so 012 for the a 01 for the B 02 for the C once they've formed those and recognize what notes they are they can be fed into the rest of the program to be used for texting or anything really I'm not a musician I'm a computer scientist it was difficult and we upset a lot of people at 2: in the morning at a hacker Thon when they were trying to sleep going will this work work blow a out oh we squeaked Etc but it does take quite a while I'll be honest okay the longest word that we can text is the word cabbage so here we [Music] go so we got 02 which represents C 012 representing a uh 01 twice representing two B's 012 again and 0 1 2 3 and then e which is a bit of a ridiculous one where she had to press 0 1 2 3 4 and five so there's quite a few finger holes involved in that one so we were actually sitting quite close to the team that was sponsoring this award and um they very quickly caught on to what was going on and Paula became known as the girl with the recorder and developed a bit of a Fanfare throughout the event and uh that led on to Paul actually winning the hacker form for that challenge um her and her partner won and one of the the prizes were I think it was four Nexus Falls and a 5 foot banana so let's say I have an important document the permission to to go to the Moon I don't know why don't know why I said that um the moon let's say that why not