MIDI Shoe Hack

This shoe hack allows you to play MIDI with you shoes! No more boring walking around, now you can play a tune where every you go. 🙂

"I’ve put together a pair of shoes that, with a little help from an Arduino, will let me trigger MIDI signals. There are FSRs (Force Sensitive Resistors) in the heels and toes of the shoes, which serve as the tap sensors. Basically, an FSR, without any applied pressure, is like a break in a circuit (i.e. has infinite resistance), and as you apply more force, it becomes less and less resistive. So, if we hook up one end of an FSR to a voltage source and the other to the Arduino’s analog input, we can send a signal to the Arduino every time we apply pressure to the FSR. We can then take this signal, convert it into MIDI, and start making sounds. I used the Serial-MIDI Converter from Spikenzie Labs. The serial-MIDI conversion could likely be performed in MAX or otherwise manually, but this does the trick and saved me some time. For the actual sounds I used Garageband, but you could use MAX, Ableton Live, etc."