I make Singing Sock Puppets. They’re computer-connected toys that can sing up and down musical scales. There’s a flex sensor inside the mouth that maps your hand movements to a musical scale – open it a little to get a low note, and open it wider to get a high note. Here’s a little clip of the original prototype in action:

At the minute, they’re in prototype form, made by sewing this flex resistor inside the puppet’s mouth, and using an Arduino board to read and measure the bend angle. The Arduino board then talks to PureData, which maps the angle to a point on a musical scale. You can tune them to sing any scale, arpeggio, mode or whatever — any range of pitches you like. They could also be used as MIDI controllers, so you could control pretty much any range of music data you can imagine.

Here are a few videos of early prototypes at music festivals, kids events, and art shows between 2007-2009. There’s something about playing together with a friend, wearing headphones…

I’ve long harbored a vague ambition to turn these prototypes into a real product someday, but I’ve done enough consulting for enough hardware startups to know how hard that is. We’ll see! You can see more recent versions over at Extraordinary Facility.