Singing Sock Puppets
An ongoing project by Matthew Irvine Brown

What are Singing Sock Puppets?
Singing Sock Puppets are computer-connected sock puppets that can sing up and down musical scales.

There are flex sensors inside their mouths. Open them a little, you get a low note; a little wider, you get a high note. And so on. They can be tuned to sing in any scale or key, at any pitch.

They're completely flexible musical instruments that can be programmed to make any type of sound you like, or adapted and used as MIDI controllers.

What are they for?
Any number of things. They're toys that can help illustrate relatively complex musical theory through play; they're capable of being used as musical instruments in their own right; learning how to make one means you'll learn about character design, textiles, electronics, computer programming, design for interactivity, music, and the connections between and across these fields. But most importantly, Singing Sock Puppets are simply great fun to play with.

What people say about them
"Playing with these taught me more about what a blues scale is than any of my music teachers at school. They're incredibly compelling to use."
Matt Webb - BERG

"Absolutely my favourite of the whole [RCA Show 2006]"
Tom Coates - Yahoo!

"Exciting and truly innovative"
Vision - Looking at the future of learning

"F***ing brilliant"
Shunt Lounge

History, current work, next steps
Matthew Irvine Brown invented the Singing Sock Puppets in 2004 when studying Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art. Since then, he has collaborated with designers and makers including Anne Brassier, Molly Anderson and Andy Huntington, exhibiting internationally. Matt also runs workshops in schools, and is currently working toward manufacturing puppet-making kits.

Make your own
Singing Sock Puppets are freely available to copy, use, share and remix under a Creative Commons Licence. They're made from a tiny amount of simple, cheap components, and the magic happens thanks to a few lines of code sitting on open source software and hardware. A flex sensor sewn inside the puppet's mouth is connected to an Arduino board. This then talks to a computer running PureData, which makes the sound. It's a perfect project to explore the basics of Physical Computing.

Download the Arduino code
Download the PureData patch

*Electronics schematics and intructions coming soon - in the meantime, use the info from this ITP Sensor Workshop to get started.

For more info, email matthew@irvinebrown.com