PingSoundPong

During my exchange Semester at the ITU Copenhagen, I attended the course Digital Experience and Aesthetics. In this course I had to do a project together with four other team members. The goal was to create an interactive experience which includes sound. In our design process, we decided on creating an experience which pleasures its recipients through the act of surprise. Building up on this idea several prototype concepts were developed.

Through testing in the development process the prototype changed from a more technically complex prototype with a simple experience to a more technically simple prototype with a complex experience. The final prototype consisted of a wooden plate against which people play ping pong.

The plate has three piezo sensors on its back, that are connected to an Arduino and through which the location of where the ball hits the plate gets calculated. Depending on where the ball hits plate, a short sound file from a predefined soundscape gets played. The vertical axis defines the pitch of the sound file and the horizontal axis defines its tone. The soundscapes we used were a laser, a gong, a bell and a base soundscape.

During the Exhibition, it turned out that our prototype is even more playful and pleasurable than we thought. People started to play together and compete against each other.