Final Project Inspiration – Joe Graff

When considering what I wanted to produce for my final project, my mind immediately went to music and music instrument production. I’m not entirely sure why this happens, but it may be because I have experience with music instrument production through a class I took here at CU called Electronic Musical Instrument Design, or it could be the fact that one of my favorite companies in existence today, Teenage Engineering, is a company who produces beautiful electronic musical instruments (and are actually a company I would very much like to work for one day). For Electronic Musical Instrument Design, I made a GameBoy, designed for music production, using a Raspberry Pi which ran a Linux-based software to emulate the GameBoy software and run the ROMs necessary in order to produce music. When I began brainstorming ideas for this project, I thought immediately of producing another handheld instrument, designed for music production; this led me down the road of synthesizers, and I thought of producing a synthesizer with the form factor of a calculator (maybe designing products which serve one purpose while looking like they serve another is becoming somewhat of a theme of mine…).

After much thought and speculation, I decided to shy away from this concept, for really no other reason than that I wasn’t all that passionate about it, and that Teenage Engineering has already done something rather similar to this idea, and done it in such a functionally and aesthetically perfect manner that any attempt at emulating this concept would be futile beyond belief. But, in spite of this, I was still rather stuck on the idea of a project which involved designing a final product who’s purpose was to produce music. I find musical instruments to be wonderful works of art, mainly because they allow others to express themselves in such beautiful ways that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

And so, for my project, I will be channeling the influences of Teenage Engineering and their beautiful, groundbreaking products, as well as the music and instrumentation of electronic-pop duo Purity Ring to achieve the final product that I deem both aesthetically and functionally satisfying.