Evan Craig
The Salt Shaker is a musical instrument / toy built upon ideas of tangible and embodied interaction. It uses an accelerometer to encode human shake gestures into digital information, thereby translating these gestures into rhythm and humanizing the digital audio synthesis process.
An Artistic Tool
An instrument should be able to make some music. No? Here are some songs I composed with the Salt Shaker. In the first one it sits along side another synthesizer. In the second one the Salt Shaker is the only sound source. It has been fed through audio effects or resampled for some parts.
Making as Research
Below are photos of some of my many various prototypes. With embodied interaction being the foundation of the project it was particularly important to make functional prototypes. This is because in order for an experience to be articulated it has to be uncovered through experimentation. It needs to be articulated so it is grounded in reality and so that improvements can be made with evidence.
I can't believe you got this far
This project like many sits in the blurry boundaries between art and design. It draws a lot from my own experience and that is where it starts from, but it does this in conversation with others. It’s not designed with a specific user in mind per se, but more from an experiential point of view. Being an artistic tool there is a lot of whimsical creative tendencies wrapped up in it, but it is also meant to be comprehensible knowable through logical thought. Developing something new without a lot of precedent is an interesting space to be in. There is a lot of meandering and there could be even more. I think on this side of it though, I have an idea of how I would better tackle it next time. Though there still would be much meandering.
ABOUT EVAN
Evan is an interdisciplinary Artist and Designer with a deep fascination of sound. He is a conflicted technologist who sees the need for creating and understanding value outside of market forces. He is trying to find ways to utilize his broad skill set for the benefit of others while trying to maintain some sort of balance in the form of artistic expression.