How It Started

The MaKey MaKey Multipurpose Kalimba was an idea built off of the initial concept of the MaKey MaKey Chord Board. Now that there was a tool that could play chords in any key, was there a way to create an ergonomic tool to play melodies in any key? We did very little prototyping for this project because our design was rather straight-forward.

MMMK 1.0 - Exterior

We knew that we wanted to use something that looked and acted like a kalimba, or thumb piano. The kalimba is a traditionally African instrument with pitches ascending either in single scale degrees or pentatonic scale degrees. The design that we created can do both. The scale, starting on the first scale degree is designed to go up by one scale degree for ten notes (from do to do to mi/me). There are five sounds that can be cycled through, using the same samples that were used for the MaKey MaKey Chord Board. The last "sound" is a duplicate of the marimba sound that is set in two pentatonic sets (stacked "Gong" scales).