Making Music, Discovering Science

Helen Steer

“Art is about paying attention” – Laurie Anderson

Everyone loves making noise: rattling sticks along railings, dinging bells on counters, swooshing up piles of leaves and hearing your own echo hooting back at you. These simple, noisy pleasures are among the most joyful parts of life.

At Do It Kits, we are inspired by this joy. We combine the fields of Science and Music, creating instruments with young people that demystify traditional instruments, encourage experimentation and provide deep understanding of topics traditionally deemed boring or esoteric. Above all, we are makers: making things, making noise, making music and attempting to make sense of our world along the way.

Over the course of the V&A‘s Digital Design Weekend, we will be presenting a new interactive work that uses cymatic patterns to explore the relationship between sound, resonance, electricity and the physical world. We’ll be demonstrating how nodal vibration can be beautiful and how to manipulate the rules of electricity to make and play music.

The spaces where different subjects collide are the most enriching places to explore, leading to deep, lasting fascination from those who learn and those who teach.

“I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning” – Plato