Why DJ’ing via a Pizza box might not be such a funny idea after all
A couple of days ago I was sent this video (below) of the a pizza box DJ set up.
Yes, that’s right. You might have seen it before, and you might have thought it was a bit of a gimmick too. That’s fine. I think that for Pizza Hut it probably was, but beneath the gimmick is a serious technology that has almost endless applications that we haven’t really thought through.
Some time ago I’m fairly sure that I shared this video …
I first saw this at Music Tech Fest in 2014 and then Novalia unsuccessfully brought their technology to Kickstarter, which was a real shame. They still have an amazing technology that could do some seriously cool things and I hope that we’ll see more of them in time.
But of course they’re not the only ones. Bare Conductive have their conductive ink and TouchBoard combo that is not only easy to use and very versatile, but entirely affordable too. If that wasn’t enough they’re also about to launch their PiCap too, in fact I think it arrives tomorrow.
Using inks to create your own MIDI interface can be amazing. I used Bare Conductive’s ink and TouchBoard back in November at an event with Heart n Soul in NESTA’s offices in London. I used two ink pads as proximity sensors to control volume and filter on a track in Live. It worked out really well, although it was difficult to calibrate to begin with.
But what it shows is that there are some amazing possibilities to use a conductive ink solution with MIDI. I probably haven’t spent enough time exploring what you can do with it enough. But it is on my to do list.
So I’m saying that whilst the pizza box is a nice gimmick, it shows that this can do a lot, a hell of a lot, and perhaps the gimmick will lead to something much better for controlling music.
