One of our sources for creativity were Public Domain images of famous painting from the Rijksmuseum. The museum is among the few who provide such images in a very accessible way and in high resolution, so promoting this collection was a pleasure, even if we did not really need all those pixels. Secondly, we used Public Domain recordings of famous music pieces provided by Sound & Vision.

In the beginning of the workshop everyone got a kit, which included an ATtiny85 microcontroller, a small speaker, a battery, a LED, a switch and resistors. Each of the microcontrollers contained a different surprise melody, which was based on one of the famous music pieces, such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. The melodies were created by converting the original mp3 recordings first into MIDI, and then into Arduino code using an online tool. They were truly surprise melodies in the sense that there was not much resemblance with the original piece in the end of the conversion process!

In order to hear their melody, the participants had to solder a functioning circuit. The electronics were then hot glued on the card itself, which was made from cardboard, foamboard and prints of downsampled Public Domain masterpiece paintings. The downsampled images were generated beforehand by pixelating the selected images of famous paintings, giving them the look of retro computer graphics. The last touch to the melody card was the switching mechanism that played the melody when opening the card.

DIY instructions & more details

Special thanks to Niklas and my colleagues Sanna, Neea, Christina and James for help, as well as to the hardworking but smiling participants and the friendly Mozilla Festival organizers.