The Music Ball Project: Concept, Design, Development, Performance

We report on the Music Ball Project, a longterm, exploratory project focused on creating novel instruments/controllers with a spherical shape as the common denominator. Besides a simple and attractive geometrical shape, balls afford many different types of use, including play. This has made our music balls popular among widely different groups of people, from toddlers to seniors, including those that would not otherwise engage with a musical instrument. The paper summarises our experience of designing, constructing and using a number of music balls of various sizes and with different types of sound-producing elements. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. University of Michigan Press 2012 ISBN 978-0-9855720-1-3.