Mechatronic Art

     A traditional piano is a furniture‑sized, metal‑stringed body whose sound is intrinsically linked to the environment around it. Owners of acoustic pianos and other stringed instruments often notice subtle shifts in tone or pitch from day to day, describing how humidity, temperature, or even the quality of light in a room physically influences the instrument’s resonance. Within this everyday experience is a quiet form of embodied self‑awareness: the musician and the instrument co‑inhabit a shared reality, and the sound they produce becomes a way of feeling the world as much as hearing it. Other beings perceive these physical vibrations within the same atmospheric field, reminding us that sound is not an anthropocentric phenomenon but a communal one.

     By miniaturizing this relationship into a toy piano, I distill that larger environmental entanglement into a smaller, more intimate scale, turning the instrument into a conceptual device for noticing subtle shifts in the world around us. In its many forms, synesthesia collapses the boundaries between senses; sound becomes color, temperature becomes texture, vibration becomes emotion. My toy piano adopts this logic not simply mimic neurological synesthesia, but to speculate alternative ways of knowing and perception within a dynamic environment. The toy piano becomes a vessel for nonbinary sensory blending, where environmental data is translated into mechanical gestures and acoustic response.

     Using a temperature and humidity sensor, I engineered an interaction in which fluctuations in the surrounding environment modulate the natural sound of the toy piano. The servo‑driven damper string tightens or slackens in response to these changes, creating a shifting sonic landscape that mirrors the instability and fluidity of the environment itself. In this miniature system, environmental phenomena are not binary measurements but embodied forces that shape the instrument’s voice. An echo of how living beings are shaped by the conditions that surround them.