Sonic Moves is a dancemat and instrument I designed and built, using 48 screenprinted sensors and wires. It is powered by Bare Conductive Touchboards coded with the Arduino IDE, which allow the sensors to trigger custom sounds using Soundplant. By engaging in playful instinctual movement, users can generate sound through movement. The goal of the project was to encourage active and playful creativity while exploring the role that our different senses play. I designed the colors and patterns as a graphic notation of the chromatic scale. Each shape and color represents a note on the piano, enabling songs to be played through physical exploration. This notation is heavily inspired by a pitch and color system created by Alexander Scriabin's Clavier à lumières. When used by a dancer, the mat becomes a creative tool for improvisation. It reverses the traditional and typical creative process of dance, which involves movements in reaction to sound, by creating sound in reaction to movement.

Sonic Paintings is a web-based drawing tool that uses microphone input to generate colors and stroke size leaving only the decision of movement to the user. This creates a space to co-create with technology and follows the same color and pitch notation as Sonic Moves.

I combined the two together and invited people to record a collective music album called Sonic Collaborations where the music is generated through Sonic Moves and the album art is generated through Sonic Paintings.