Something Musical About Forms is a musical step sequencer drum machine disguised as a form entry task on a 1980s style text-based computer terminal interface. The work was shown during the event: DAWN of Compliance which took place on Saturday, May 3rd, 2025, a creation of the studio Also.Does.Stuff. DAWN of Compliance is an immersive theater created around the concept of a dystopian corporate office environment where attendees are treated as new office hires.
During the event, participants are asked to sit at this employee’s desk and take over their form entry tasks for awhile. They are asked to wear headphones for an immersive experience. The computer form has 4 rows of eight columns. Data can be any of the characters 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c. The data entry task is to go through the stack of handwritten forms and enter these into the computer. As form data is entered, drum beats are played, and continue to play. The text-based data entry task masks a full musical drum sequencer underneath. Data entered, creates the set of active drum beats to play. Each character 1…9,a,b,c play a different drum beat with the 0 character representing silence. Drum beats are played for each of the 8 columns in sequence, then loop starting at the beginning. For a given column all 4 rows are played simultaneously. There are 13 other special characters on the keyboard that pause all music playing and display a full-screen banner with accompanying special sounds and computer generated speech. Participants can just enter data from the forms or they can compose their own drum beats by editing the forms on the computer and listening to the results.
See Something Musical About Forms Music x Tech Talk (at 8:00 minutes) for an introduction to the work and a live demo.
Technical
Something Musical About Forms is a standalone embedded linux device running on a Raspberry Pi 2 with a USB sound-card, speakers and headphones. It is programmed in Python using the Python curses library, ascii_magic library and the pygame library for all real-time audio generation. Additionally, the work uses the Magicforce MF34 keyboard which is a QMK/VIA programmable keyboard, with a custom set of MX keycaps swapped in.
