GRIDI is a Giant MIDI Sequencer

The brainchild of Yuvi Gerstein, GRIDI is a large-scale physical MIDI sequencer. First exhibited at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem back in August 2015, it has since toured the world including stops at the Digital Life Design in Munich and WIRED’s Next Fest in Milan.

The incredible installation was designed with one simple goal in mind: to demonstrate that modern music composition can accessible and intuitive for all. GRIDI consists of a table measuring 9.1' x 5.4' in size with a 16 X 16 array of indents embedded with LEDs.

Music is made by placing transparent balls at different spots on the grid. You have an option to create drum patterns, a melody, and bass lines simultaneously — seven rows for the melody, five for drum sounds and the remaining four for bass. Each instrument is assigned a color — drums are blue, bass is orange and melodies are purple. This is customizable, though.

When ready to play, a line of green lights illuminate to a set tempo from left to right, and then reappear at the beginning to start the loop over. Whenever it hits a ball placed on a line, it makes the sound of that ball in that position.

GRIDI enables anyone to make their own composition, or given its size, to collaborate with up to four other people. Once you’re done moving the balls around, step back and listen to your unique sound.

Control is accomplished by an Arduino, along with a Macbook Pro running Arduino software and Ableton Live. There’s also a custom Max for live patch to receive the input form the grid and to command the LEDs. As you could guess, there’s plenty of wiring under the hood that makes this impressive instrument work.

Intrigued? Prepare to be amazed as Gerstein performs the Michael Jackson classic “Billie Jean” on GRIDI below. You can also read more about the giant sequencer here.