and a visionary of how we can interact with sound and touch.

She's creating new ways, meshing up the digital with the physical, and finding new ways to free the wonders of technology from their devices to surfaces that we want to interact with. Most importantly, Kate is bringing back a little bit of magic into our worlds. Please give a very, very warm welcome for Kate Stone, Paper Music Instruments.

Thank you for coming along to listen to me speak. So my name's Kate Stone, and I want to tell you a little bit about my journey,

how I come to do what I do, and also about a sort of vision or a feeling that I've developed for the future and how I've got to that point. I believe that the future will look more like the past than the present

and that it will be more of an old-fashioned, magical world than the sort of scary, dystopian, minority-report world that we might think we're walking into. And I think that's because we're always nostalgic about the past

and sometimes fearful of the future, and the people of the future will already be living there, and so they will be more nostalgic for a past that we are worried that we're going to lose. So when I talk, I never have any slides.

I have lots of things that I've made and a few videos that I'm going to play, and I often don't quite know what I'm going to say, so just bear with me. Also, I need to set my timer because I have no idea how long I will speak for. Just bear with me.

So what I do is I guess I seem to have found that I've become immersed in a world that's very often very binary. Is something this way or is something that way? Is it physical? Is it digital? Are we thinking of something futuristic or are we thinking of something from the past?

I started out working with electronics, and my background is that I'm a scientist, but some people have said that I'm an artist. I'm not really sure whether I am or I am not. So then there's a kind of question of art or science. And what I do is I work with printing, and I also work with electronics, and they're often two totally different worlds.

And what I seem to have found in this binary world that the place where I seem to end up is somewhere in the middle. And I'll just show you something that we created a little while ago because otherwise no one has a clue what I'm talking about. So we printed this poster, and it's a poster of a drum kit.

This is a baby version. We can print really quite large ones. And when you touch it... It's kind of fun. At least I find it fun. I can... Thanks.

Someone can have a play with it. I don't know if I'm allowed to do this, but can I pass this to you? So what we do is we print conductive inks to create a touch interface, and then have a small circuit board that we stick on the back

and use that to add capacitive touch to pieces of paper. And we can print these things from the size of a postcard all the way to, well, I usually say the size of a bus shelter, but we did something recently that was 50 feet in the street in Austin.

I'll just say a little bit more about my background, and I really don't know how I've ended up doing this, but I remember as a child, I always used to play around with electronics, and I used to pull my siblings' toys apart, something which they've actually never forgiven me for. And what I was really fascinated by was not really the technology,

but kind of how to use the technology in a way that people didn't really know what I was doing. So I used to hide speakers and microphones and switches around my bedroom, and thread wires under the carpet and behind the walls. And I'd hide in a cupboard and put my voice through a microphone and make it come out from somewhere else. And it's just when I looked back at that

and realized I wasn't trying to play with tech for the sake of tech. I was trying to create some kind of experience, but I never really knew that at the time. It's just what I wanted to do. I also remember I got one of my dad's books, and I carved out the inside, which he wasn't happy about. And I ordered one of the electronics kits

you could order from the back of a magazine where you could build a radio transmitter with a microphone, and I hid it inside the book. And I hid the book next to my parents, and I snuck back to my bedroom and tuned in and listened. It was not good what I heard. I kind of regret that.

But for me, I'm also looking back at what I do now, and it's the sort of story that I've told in the last few years. I've realized that what I do is what I used to do as a child. Yeah, so I ended up becoming a scientist through some kind of crazy journey of failing at school,

disappearing into the desert, chasing sheep around, being a farmer, and then somehow I ended up going to university and studying electronics. And then I ended up doing a PhD in physics in Cambridge where I was looking at how electrons move. But my fascination really is about how things are made,

how to make things, how to make electronic devices. And something recently that I guess I've been asking myself is what is the difference between science and art? And we're often asked, are we a scientist or an artist? And I guess the sort of conclusion that I've come to for now

is that science is an understanding of the inside, and art seems to be a description of the outside. And when you add science and art together, I think that you can end up with something that's much more like nature. So for now I've been saying science plus art is nature, and I think that's the type of thing that I want to create.

I want to create more natural experiences with a digital world by combining art and science. After I did my PhD in physics, which was looking at moving these electrons around, I ended up working for a startup company that were looking how to print transistors,

how to totally change the way we created electronics. And I worked there for four years, and I learned a lot about being in a startup and about how difficult it is to try and do things totally differently, how difficult it is when you reinvent totally new materials, new methods to make things,

and new machines to make those things with. And after working there for four years, I left and I started out on my own in my garage, and that was about 11 years ago. So I think I've been hiding away in the beginning in my garage on my own and then slowly kind of building a team of people. There's seven of us in my team now.

I'm based in Cambridge. But we've been quite disconnected, I feel, from the rest of the world in what we do and seem to have ended up doing things quite differently to a lot of what I see around, which for quite a long time was quite scary because no one really understood why I was doing what I was doing. But more recently, people have started to discover what we do

and seem to really like it, and some companies are starting to adopt it, which is, for us, really exciting. And the thing that I became fascinated by as a scientist was printing and seeing how pervasive printing is.

Printing is everywhere. It's all around us. There's more print than there are electronic devices, and print manufacture is in every single city in the world. It's the most pervasive, highest-volume form of manufacturing, and printing is something that's revolutionized and democratized the world when books went from being written one by one

to the few people that could read and translated by the few people that could translate to something that anyone can have and information that could be anywhere. So I became fascinated with printing and how I could use that to start to make electronics. And then, in the beginning, I was printing my own transistors,

and I was quite proud that in my garage, I had what I thought were the world's best transistors. But with hindsight, I also had the world's worst transistors. They really weren't very good. It was like going back to Intel 1969. And so I quickly realized that the right thing to do was to combine this traditional printing

with everyday low-cost electronics, the sort of electronics you might find in a Happy Meal toy or you might find in a greetings card, and how to take a low-cost microcontroller and combine it with a piece of print to make something that was interactive. And I guess something that I became inspired by, really,

was this idea that almost, that poster's so noisy. This idea that we always think that what we need is something that we don't have, and realizing that so often, everything we have is at our fingertips,

and we can repurpose, reuse, and reimagine how to use those things that are around us to start to create totally different things and totally different experiences. When I started out, one of the things, well, there was two things I told myself. One is, I'm going to have no vision and no mission.

And that set me free to be an explorer because I'd not made any promises to anyone that this is what I'm going to do or I've raised this money to do this particular thing. And the second thing was that I'm going to create things that my science friends laugh at, not in a good way, look down on, and pour scorn on,

because I wanted to set myself free from trying to create things to impress people. I wanted to make things that would make people smile and make people feel immersed in some kind of experience. And those two things really set me free right from the beginning. It's made it quite a scary journey. It's always been difficult to find funding

and to do things when so many people around me are telling me, A, it won't work, and B, if it does, nobody will want it. But there's just this growing belief of just, and my innovation and my inventiveness is all about how to repurpose what's around us.

And just a little thought I had, which was actually just last week, I was looking at an oak tree, and I just thought that massive oak tree grew from an acorn only from things it could touch and with some kind of sense of inevitability. And it made me think that's like how I've been over the years, just always thinking,

how can I use the printing machines as they are? How can I use the inks as they are? How can I use the electronics as they are and just try and be creative? And that's, I guess, kind of what we've done. Yeah, so, and I keep saying me, but it is a team,

so my team's quite diverse. I, as a scientist, realized that what I created in the beginning looked a bit like a Doc Brown science experiment. It was something that I felt ashamed of, and I really needed to do something about that.

So the first person that I hired was a graphic designer, because I needed the perspective, a totally different perspective of what I was creating, and I needed that design perspective. I remember one of the first things we tried to create was a greetings card, and what I asked her to do

was to design a greetings card, design the line work in a greetings card so that it was very heavy on the line art, and then I took it and I rubbed out little parts in Photoshop to allow a circuit to flow through, to flow through that line art.

So you could pick up this greetings card that had a beautiful image of some flowers, and just by where you held it, it naturally started the candles to flicker, and the current was rooted through a cupcake, and when you blew on the cupcake, it could sense your breath, because the moisture landed on the cupcake and it blew out the candles,

but you had to blow on it twice, and then when you'd done that, it played happy birthday. It's something I made a long time ago, but it just taught me a lot about how art and science needed to be combined totally as one thing, and how to create something that was just an experience. So I'll say a little bit more about how it works,

what we create. We print conductive ink, and we either use screen printing, which is the same way T-shirts are printed and is in every city, or we use flexo printing, which is how things like labels are printed, shampoo bottle labels, wine bottle labels,

and using that, we can print conductive ink when we use flexo printing. We can print at 100 meters a minute, and we can print A4 size full XY multi-touch track pads on a press that's normally used to print a wine bottle label at 100 meters a minute,

and then all we need to do is then add on our electronic circuit board, and because we've been doing this for such a long time, we started using circuit chips that weren't generally readily available, so we're using microcontrollers from Taiwan, where often we have to write the code in assembler. There's no user forum. There's pretty much hardly any paperwork to go with it,

and it's really quite challenging, but we've managed to combine these things together and do things with those chips that they said we couldn't actually do, so it's about bringing those two things together. Yeah, I will show a little video which shows something that we made

for an advertising agency. I think it was last year. A lot of what we've ended up doing for now has been working with ad agencies to create experiences for people that they want associated with their products, so the video's called Sound of Taste. Hopefully you can play that video for me.

Do you have the video, the Sound of Taste video? I have to what?

It's not on my computer. I gave them on a memory stick. No. I need my videos. Can you ask this? Okay. I don't mind waiting for a minute.

If it was on my memory stick, if they could find the video, that would be great. Because I have four videos. The Sound of Taste. Sound of Taste. Because someone passed the message back and let them know I need my video.

Okay, I think there's some audio missing, but you can carry on playing. This is showing how we print it, and this is Maria. She's the designer who's the first person

that joined my team. And what we created was this mix of digital and physical, so we printed and created this beautiful artwork of these plumes of color that were to represent what spices might sound like. And when you touch the poster, it connects to a smartphone, and it plays beautiful piano chords.

And really, it was just about how to combine the physical and the digital worlds together and create some kind of experience. It was for Swartz.

I think the missing audio is probably my fault, so sorry about that. Yeah, so so much of what we've been doing

has been working with these advertising agencies. And that's been really great, because once they've seen some of the things that we can do, they become really excited about that, and then started putting it into their campaigns. I mean, I would love to have some products out, which is something that we're working on now,

but the great thing about the ad agencies is they love to make beautiful videos, and they love to win awards, and they love to show off. And actually, just before I came on stage, someone emailed me a video from McDonald's, and it's called MacTrax, and they've been DJing from the paper tray in the McDonald's tray,

which is kind of funny for me, because we started out using these chips that were used in those Happy Meal toys, and now our print is being put onto their product, which is quite exciting. So in trying to work with these advertising companies and also trying to work with lots of other people, the challenge has been is that we've created this platform

that's been very, very difficult to make open, because we've not used chips that are generally available, and we've not done it in a way that we can open source any code or anything, because there's actually no way to program the chips, because the chips can't even be programmed once. So what we spent a lot of time doing in the last year

is trying to create a very easy way for anyone to make anything with our technology, and we're doing this by printing conductive ink stickers in a range of sizes that have a fixed template and creating a control module, which I'm sure anyone can see, but this small circuit board that has some pads on the back.

And all you do is take that piece of print and press the circuit board on, and that creates a piece of interactive print, and we've created some software tools that are really easy to use. I can't actually code, and so I've kind of not expected anyone else to have to code with what we do.

So in our software tool, all you do is you drag in the sound you want to use. You choose from a drop-down list what you want each touch point to do, whether you want it to play or be a volume control, or also in our Bluetooth version, it can trigger videos or it can trigger audio on a smartphone.

And then you save that and put that onto the circuit board, either with a micro SD card or it's pushed over Bluetooth onto the Bluetooth module. So in that way, someone can create an interactive experience with a piece of print in just a few minutes, and then they can show someone.

And once someone sees what we've created, they seem to instantly want it, which has been really exciting. But I think also the difference in how we're trying to make things is once you've created one thing with this, that description of what you've created of how that works can be sent to a factory and we can make a million. So we're trying to find a very easy way,

not really for makers. I want it for makers, but I really want to empower creators. People who have an idea of something they want to make can instantly create something that fits with their vision. But then once they've done that, if they want to make, like I say, a million or a thousand or ten, then there's no other development to do.

That can be instantly done. So our challenge really has been how to create this platform where we can let other people start to make things. And that's what's been really exciting for us. Yeah, so I think I'll say a little bit also

about the Bluetooth version. The Bluetooth version of this platform, what we're doing is we've made a website that you can go to. And on that website, you just type in a new app name, you choose what the touch points do, upload your assets, and click Publish. And then it instantly becomes available to the player version of the app that we have.

And then you can just touch that piece of print and it will start to let that experience unfold. So when I've been thinking about digital, I think about digital a lot and what does that actually mean. And so much of what we know and love that's around us has been killed off by digital. We think about books, we think about physical music.

People even say the high street is dead or physical advertising. So I think, to me, digital is three things. It's touch, the ability to touch something that has no moving parts, and yet somehow it knows. It's connectivity, so you can update it,

you can give it new information, and it's data, it's the ability to capture data, the ability to know maybe who is touching what, where, why, and when, which is a little bit scary. But so much of what is digital, the value comes from the data. And that is what we're trying to create. So I call that description a digital soul. So our software tools, the idea is you can define

a digital soul and put it into a physical item. And I think that has the potential to change so much. One of the things we say is to the iPad generation, print is just a broken touchscreen. And you will have heard of two-year-olds who try to touch a magazine page and swipe

or try to pinch and zoom on a magazine page and don't know why it doesn't work. And on the face of it, what we're trying to create to allow everyday objects to become digital objects, we get asked how people know where to touch, why will people want this?

But I think that is what the next generation not only wants, but it's what they expect without them even knowing it's what they're going to want. So we want to try and create a platform that's very easy to manufacture so that we can fulfill these desires of the next generation.

But we want to try and do it in a way that doesn't create objects that look like there's something out of the minority report. I want to create things that look more like something out of Mary Poppins or something out of Harry Potter so these two-year-olds can kind of have the experiences that they expect to have.

We made a brochure recently for, actually it was last year, for an advertising agency for Audi. And that shows how you can connect the page of a brochure to a smartphone. So hopefully I'll play another video. It's called the Audi TT Brochure Hack. If it's a video, it'll be great.

Find my video. Audi TT Brochure Hack. Thanks.

Sorry, there's a missing audio again. I think maybe the videos are playing in mono or something. So the idea is you can touch the brochure and it connects to the smartphone. You can play around with it by touching the brochure, and the smartphone becomes the dashboard.

And you can also press a button and start a, I think, ask for a test drive as well. And that won a bronze award at Cannes for the advertising agency. I think so much of what I see is that

so many products and so many things are becoming commoditized. And I think what that means is that there's so much value instead of objects, it is an experience. So the things that we're trying to create are more of an experience rather than a product.

I'll show you something else that we made recently. This was for a young singer-songwriter, and we just made it over a few days. We made like 50 of them, me and her manager and her. She's called B Charlotte. And she was having a debut single launch.

It was a week before last, and she wanted to make something that was an invite that she could send out to the music industry that would let them experience her music in a totally different way. So this little cassette here is the invite to her gig, which was really awesome. And all you do is you fold the box up.

Oh, I'll actually say how this came about. Me and Charlotte were sat in a coffee shop, and we were talking about how we could make some kind of interactive invite. And there was a box of chocolates on the table, and I thought, why don't we turn what is a cardboard box

that the chocolates might come into into a boom box? And so this is what we did. Can you hear it at all?

You can remix on the box, so it's a four-track audio. A bit difficult to see from here, but...

So in designing that, it didn't take very long at all. All it is is a sticker on the box, a graphic stuck on top, and using the software tool, you can split a four-track audio into this, so we're able to remix on the box. And she sent that out to various people

in the music industry, and she had a really successful gig, which was pretty awesome. And the following week, nothing to do, I'm sure, with what I created, but she got her first play on BBC Radio 1, which was really exciting for her. It's also exciting for me because she's actually my niece, so you've got to help your family out.

I'm going to try and demo a couple more things. I always bring way too much tech, and it just makes it very confusing for me, so...

Oh, yeah. Sorry. I have to keep looking at my notebook for my notes, but I don't know if anyone knows why notebooks are called notebooks. This is a really bad joke, by the way. It's because they play notes, so I can use the cover of my notebook...

..some tunes, but I'm not actually a pianist, so I wish I could actually play, but I can't. I would pass that around, but actually, I need my notes.

We made this album cover for DJ Qbert. He's probably one of the best scratch DJs in the world. I'd say he is. And he saw a talk that I did where I made some cardboard DJ decks

and tried to DJ from them, and this inside is the world's thinnest DJ decks, and you can scratch and mix and crossfade from them. I'm not a DJ.

And I like to hack my hat as well,

so I can do the sound effects from my hat, which is kind of fun. I just make all this crazy shit all the time, and it's kind of what I've been doing since I was a kid. And I keep saying these things that I want to make, and people believe me and then give me some money,

and then I make it, and me and my team make it. And every time I say it, I really expect to get laughed out of the room, but now people are actually saying, yeah, they want it. But I kind of have to explain a bit of the back story as to how I ended up doing this, because sometimes I really don't know. Yeah, and actually, there was something that I was saying last year.

I think it was the beginning of last summer, because I really want to create these totally natural experiences in some way that just move our minds away from how we use a smartphone to how we use a computer into something that's just totally different, much more like nature. So the thing that I had in my mind was

I would like to walk through a forest and walking through the forest, and just what I naturally do is a way to produce music, and I'm not a music producer or a DJ. So if you could touch the leaves or touch the flowers or the things that you walk over, start to trigger sound effects.

And I said this to some people that I met in San Francisco and then in LA, and it seemed to fit with their dreams too, but then they do tend to smoke things that kind of give them these feelings, so I think these things were a bit more natural to them. And so they gave us a bit of money,

and we built some things at a large EDM festival, and we made three mandalas that were on the floor that are two meters in diameter that when you walk over trigger sound effects. And we made flowers out of paper and built these trees with these cardboard tubes that you could touch the flowers, and they would trigger sound effects.

And then I happened to be talking to some people at NASA, and they really liked the idea too, so they pointed me in the direction of NASA space sounds. So we created a NASA space sound soundscape that could be triggered by using these things. So there's a video which I hope works, and the video's called Nocturnal Wonderland.

Please play that video. Oh, no. Can't hear me. Nocturnal Wonderland. Nocturnal video. The video. Yeah. Nocturnal Wonderland.

You can all hear me saying that, right? With some audio would be nice.

That was kind of fun. That's Madhu at the end, and she's one of my designers, so she pulled a lot of that together.

And we only had a couple of weeks, so it's something we threw together quite quickly. In the very beginning, it shows us in a hardware store. We had to actually go and buy all the wood and build everything in about two days. It was a little bit crazy. But it was great, and we had a lot of fun playing around with that. And then I was talking to some people I met at the end of last year in New York,

and they were talking about South by Southwest. And they wanted to create some kind of musical experience for Bud Light, and they wanted basically to take that idea and just make it even bigger. So we built five installations in March at South by Southwest.

We built a 50-foot wall of music in the street so you could touch on this wall and create all different sound effects, which is the sort of thing that I had in my head. When I'm walking down the street with my headphones on, I want to touch the wall. I want to create music. I want to play around with sounds, and I do, but nothing happens. And we made, I think, three other walls

that were eight feet by 20 feet that you could touch and were Bluetooth MIDI interfaces to Ableton for people to remix music who had never remixed music before. So I have a video of that, and the video's called South by Southwest.

Hopefully, it will play. Yes.

There's a lot of sound missing. I'm sorry. I don't know why.

Sound missing.

Okay. You can't really hear the sound. I don't know where the sound is.

Okay. Okay. Never mind. It's okay. Just stop it. Sorry. All my audio's mixed.

I'm not sure why, but... You can't hear the audio. Never mind.

Maybe I'll try and put the video online or something. I'll try and show you from here what it does. So what those posters were doing, which you couldn't hear, which is such a shame because it was really pretty awesome, and we had the stems from some pretty major artists. So we had stems from X Ambassadors, Z, Tory Lanez,

and a whole bunch of people, and we remixed their songs and put them onto that wall. So I tried to create a baby version of it. And those people that were being interviewed had never touched anything with music before, and they were doing remixes, so... Turn this up a little bit. So I just made this last week,

and it's just a way to try and show that instead of trying to create music with this, if anyone can see... Yeah. Which scares me. It took me a year to be brave enough to try and use that because it's Ableton, which is awesome software, but the software is an awesome interface,

but just the fact that it's on a computer just scared me for a year to be brave enough to touch it and try to figure out how to use it. So last week we made this, and there's these flowers. All the audio is quantized, so each flower is a different instrument,

and you can touch it and change the loops. Each petal is a loop, and these flowers are vocal one-shots.

And the flamingo is the acapella for the whole song. I'm not really sure why, but it seemed like a good idea.

It's so difficult for me to describe all the things that we make and how we make it, and it's kind of challenging to describe the journey sometimes. So I tried to show things,

and, you know, we tried to show videos of what we do, but this... Actually, it's just a little poster with some flowers on, but it really sums up exactly what we're trying to do. This is printed at our local screen printer. The design just doesn't take us very long at all, and it can be designed anywhere.

It's using a circuit board that's totally generic and comes from Asia, and we put it together just like you might put a stamp on an envelope. It's really easy to make, and we could go from... Now we've made one, we could make many. And this is what a computer interface could look like

in the future maybe, something that a bee would understand that because it's a flower, and it talks to it in a way that it seems to mean something so much more. And the people I was trying to show in that video, they found that they could remix and play with music, something that they never knew that they'd done.

And so that's kind of what we're trying to do. We're trying to create a way that products can be designed anywhere by anyone. They can be made locally anywhere and to try and democratize that and to use things that are already around and already exist, but to try and create these experiences that could look much more like the past than the present.

And that's really the message that I want to sort of just get across is that using so much of what's already around us, I think we can create a future that's going to look so much more magical than perhaps we're scared that we're going towards. So maybe I'll stop now and take some questions.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Kate. You can raise your hands now, and we'll bring a microphone to you.

Everybody's still digging the magic. Over there. Thank you. Just thinking, because we have so many refugees coming over to Europe,

of course we could design picture dictionaries and translating more easily than otherwise because everyone could listen to what should it sound like and stuff like that. I think there's a very practical application for your ideas as well,

even though I appreciate very much the beautiful aesthetic applications that you create. Thanks. Yeah, I think that's something that's really magical. When you combine graphics and sound, there's so much more that you can do. When you just have graphics, you're limited to that space,

and then you're often limited to just that language. But I think when design's done where language is a challenge, because there's so many languages, when you think of how things are designed at something like an event like the Olympics, so much thought goes into designing things so that the graphics tell you without language

what it's trying to do. And it actually creates much more beautiful and more simple graphics. But then if you can touch these things and have sound on them and then touch something that's representative of your language, then, yeah, hearing something in any language or a greater selection of languages would be really awesome. But I also think with what we're trying to create

with this platform, instead of a product being designed by several thousand people in California, say, and made by a million people in one factory in China, maybe the things and the products that are out are designed by those refugees, designed by those people,

not designed by me. Yeah, because I want to create a platform where someone locally, say in South Africa, designs something based on their local needs that no one would have any clue that it's incredibly useful in Iceland. And that's the amazing thing about diversity. When we just have more people

and so many more different people designing and creating things than we would ever imagine, there's so much more benefit for everybody. I have a technological question. You're using conductive ink on paper.

Yeah. And the difference from my point of view, one of the main difference between the paper and the circuit board is that circuit board is not flexible and paper is flexible. Do you use flexibility also as an instrument?

So, yeah, the circuit board is rigid. I mean, at the moment, we use a rigid circuit board and we could use a flexible circuit board, but we don't because we're trying to keep the cost slow, so we use a rigid circuit board. So there's two ways I can sort of go with that. One is that my vision of what I really want to create

is to print that circuit board. So I want to print using Flexo and fine lines, conductive tracks, to create a circuit board, print the resistors, print the capacitors, and instead of putting a packaged chip on it as we know it,

take that silicon die and embed that into that. I'd love to create things that look like postage stamps on a reel that are flexible, that can then stick onto pieces of paper and make them interactive, and that's what I was trying to do quite a few years ago, but I realized that was going to take so much money and so much development that we've kind of just gone for a very simple, rigid circuit board

and ink on paper. We can also print the ink on plastic, and the graphics can be on plastic, and I'll just say a little bit more about that as well. The biggest challenge that we had for so many years was how to stick the circuit board and the print together. It was so difficult.

We tried with conductive inks, conductive glues, conductive pastes, putting holes in the circuit board and poking it through, using special tapes as well, but none of them worked. And then a couple of years ago, I discovered that I could stick a circuit board down using double-sided sticky tape, which was like, oh, my God, why did I not think of that,

and then realized I just had. So our electronics can actually stick onto the reverse of the print. It capacitively couples. So we have a very, very easy way of sticking the two together. And I think at the beginning, as I was saying, things are always very binary. Our challenge has been how to bring things together in a totally seamless way,

and that's what we've managed to do with the print and the electronics. Are there more questions? Yes, there's one over there. Also, regarding the technological side, you said you should choose Ableton

as a program compatible for your MIDI controllers. I think it's kind of creative MIDI controllers, if I understood that right. So why Ableton? Because it's a very complex and great DAW, but it's not really known for its intuitive interface. It's intuitive now.

So it's like the most modular software to adapt to? I understand what you're saying. I think it can be counterintuitive to use Ableton, because you're kind of used to just maybe...

I don't know. It's a different thought process, isn't it? So we're used to things being linear, so often software is used to be linear. For music, you put things in a linear fashion and produce things that way. Ableton has two modes, and the mode that is confusing is the live mode,

which has columns instead, and you put samples in those columns, which is what this is. And I stared at it for a year, and I was given a copy of it, and I stared at it for a year, and it just confused me. But once I actually forced myself to play with it, I got it very quickly, and I can tell someone how to use it in 15 minutes, and they can start using it.

So it's confusing, because it's counterintuitive, but actually, it's really easy to use, and I find it brilliant for this, because you can trigger all of these sound effects, and everything's quantized, and it just works so well. But what we did initially, when we were trying to pair the Cuba album with the DJ software,

and we used DJ by algorithm. We were trying to link straight into that software, but there was then rumors of Apple bringing out MIDI over Bluetooth, and so I joined the MIDI working group. I infiltrated it, got my hands on the documents, and we were able to adopt the Apple MIDI Bluetooth protocol

to our print, so it's not limited to Ableton or anything. It is just a MIDI controller. It pairs in a Mac in MIDI settings. It pairs in GarageBand, and you can use it with anything, so you can use it with Logic, Pro Tools, GarageBand, anything at all. My notebook can, you know,

you can play around on that notebook with any music software. A long answer again, I'm sorry, but... And we have time for one more. I have to say, statistically, this half of the room has been rather quiet. Um... I'll play some music. It's fine.

I wish every speaker did that when we were waiting for questions, so come in. But if there are no more coming... Maybe someone can play with it. Then I'm gonna... First of all, I'd like to... Small apology to you, Kate, and to everybody in the room for some sound issues that we had. Um... Excuse me. Okay, wait, okay.

Sorry, you were hidden in the back, but now you're waving so profoundly. We'll definitely still take your question. Okay. Uh, thank you for the last question. Um, I'm a user interface designer, and I don't make music. I make interfaces, and I use Photoshop and InDesign and Illustrator and stuff like that, and so I thought, like,

it could be a really good way to give people more... more acceptable fields of color, because if you have these huge gradients in a huge color field, sometimes it's way harder to accept them pointing on the color and showing people this color is what I want and then have the digital, uh, other parts of it.

So, is it... Would it be possible to make such a detailed, um, platform where it can point on the color of a gradient and say this color I want for my user interface or for my picture or something like that? Yeah, that's a really cool idea.

So, um... With most of these things, they're screen-printed, and we create large touch points, but when I was describing the Flexo printing before, that has millimeter resolution. Um, at the moment, it's about sort of A5 or so,

where you can create these touch pads and they're opaque touch pads, so you could have this touch pad that would be just, I mean, paper-thin, really, or a couple of millimeters just to accommodate a slim battery, and you could put a graphic on top, and, yeah, that could be a perfect way of just touching a printed graphic

and that could send out a code that would be that color, and I guess you could map it to Pantone or whatever color palette you might want, but, yeah, you could touch the colors and get exactly that. And I guess also the cool thing is is that it's not another part of your computer screen, so if you're using Photoshop or whatever you're using,

you have all of these boxes, all of these things, which are just somewhere for you to click, cluttering up the area that you need for your music or for the video production or for the image, and we could just create a little box of postcards that you could get out, lay around your computer, and touch all of these things

and select all of these different things. If that's for you doing some design, it gets it all off your screen, and it makes your user interface just be all around you, or like for me, playing piano on my notebook when I can have the music on the screen, or for a DJ, having phasers and all kind of sound effects on postcards all around will be really cool, too, or, you know, my hat.

Thanks. Wonderful. Kate, thank you so, so much for being here with us and also for staying with us throughout Republica. For everybody who's liked to try this hands-on, you're kindly giving a workshop on Wednesday, early afternoon at the Gig Makerspace. I'm really looking forward to that.

And yeah, a really big round of applause. Thank you so much, Kate. Thank you. You know the usual, 50-minute break, and then we're going to be back here on stage one with Richard Sennett. See you then.