SquishyMusic

The Site

Alongside the physical instrument, I built a companion site to introduce it — walking through the feel of the orb and the Arduino-and-rubber build behind it.

The Problem

Most digital instruments ask a user to learn something before they can play — a button layout, a gesture vocabulary, a MIDI mapping. That barrier is exactly what keeps people who "aren't musical" from ever picking one up.

I wanted to design something where the first five seconds required no instruction at all: no manual, no onboarding screen, nothing to read. Just pick it up.

The Approach

I started with a $12 off-the-shelf stress toy rather than custom fabrication, specifically to test the core interaction assumption cheaply: could pressure alone feel expressive enough to hold someone's attention? Informal hallway testing showed people intuitively squeezed, twisted, and cradled the orb without being told to — which validated the interaction model before I committed to building anything custom.

From there I moved to a custom shell (Agilus 30, PolyJet-printed) and distributed pressure sensors across the entire surface instead of at fixed points, so there's no "correct" way to hold it — every grip becomes a valid input rather than a wrong answer. An Arduino Nano ESP32 maps continuous pressure to sound and light in real time, so feedback is immediate and legible even to first-time users.

What I Learned

Watching people play it taught me more than any spec sheet could. Testers consistently used two hands and shifted grip within seconds of picking it up, so I widened the pressure-sensitive zone and slowed the light response so it read as "listening" rather than glitching — a small timing change that made the object feel responsive instead of broken.

The project earned two rounds of NYU Prototyping Fund support, largely on the strength of how people reacted the first time they held it — the clearest signal I had that the no-interface approach actually worked.

Specs