Musical Glasses

This is the original exhibit: 8 glasses ranging exactly one octave in pitch and two mallets. The idea is that the user will engage with it on a very visceral level--as an open exploration, my hope with this exhibit was that users would immediately know what to do and just play, experimenting with different tunes and potentially trying out different ways to make the sounds (mallets vs. wet finger on the rim). I care less about what users would say when they walk away from the exhibit and more about the smiles on their faces while playing with it.

In class today, I really enjoyed watching people in our group play with these glasses because it did two things. Firstly, it gave me confidence that this is a valuable idea, because although some people had reservations about this idea over my infinity mirror, they were still drawn to the exhibit and found themselves playing with it. Secondly, it gave me an interesting "nugget" of observation that I hadn't noticed before: people get more excited about being able to make the glasses "sing" by rubbing the ribs rather than the actual sound being made. I think this will take me in a really interesting direction this week--I plan on just watching people play with my glasses as I leave them out in my house. I will put the mallets there to see if they are used or ignored, but I expect they won't get much attention.