An instrument needs a shape.
Software gets a face when you can hold it — and a reminder that DRC is a thing, not just a window.
[ Project 01 · gnration · Laboratórios de Verão ]Harpa Laser.
Harpa Laser.
Eight strings of light.
A playable harp where every string is a green laser beam. Break a beam with your hand and a note fires from DRC, our synth engine. Built with Rui Antunes for gnration's Laboratórios de Verão — to be played publicly during Noite Branca '15 in downtown Braga. Everything else — BMW's 100-year celebration at Autódromo do Estoril, Casa da Música in Porto, the Galp Energia store opening, TEDx — came after.
[ Featured at ]
[ The brief ]
gnration — Braga's cultural institution — put out an open call for Laboratórios de Verão: a media arts piece to be exhibited at Noite Branca '15. Harpa Laser was our proposal. Braga's old centre is baroque; Noite Branca fills the same streets with multimedia and contemporary music — we wanted to put a reinterpretation of a classical instrument right in the middle of it. Retro-futurist, playable by anyone, and tuned so a child or a stranger could never hit a wrong note.
[ 02 / How it works ]
A harp, but the strings can't break.
- 01 · Frame
Iron, over two metres, over seventy kilos.
A minimalist take on the classic harp silhouette — one side dropped away — machined and welded in a Braga workshop.
- 02 · Lasers
Eight 532 nm green emitters, top rail.
Aimed straight up at eight matching photodiodes embedded in the top. The beams are barely visible until the smoke machine wakes up.
- 03 · Sense
The diodes watch for shadows.
A finger interrupts a beam; the microcomputer in the base debounces it and fires a note to the synth.
- 04 · Tuned to a scale
Always in a scale. No wrong notes.
Each beam is mapped to a note of the scale — the outer, longer beams play the lower pitches, the inner ones climb.
- 05 · Voice
The notes feed DRC.
The synth engine we ship as software runs the sound. Anything DRC can synthesise, the harp can play — we patched it to a different voice at every event.
[ 03 / Afterlife ]
Built for Noite Branca. Then it kept getting invited.
[ 04 / Where it began ]
The reason it exists in the first place — downtown Braga.
This is where the harp was always meant to live — outside the gallery, in public, in front of strangers. Noite Branca puts multimedia and contemporary music straight into the baroque centre of Braga, and the harp was built for exactly that moment. Children played it like a toy. Adults reached for it cautiously, then didn't want to stop.
Nobody asked what brand it was. Nobody asked what it ran on. They just played it. That's still the highest compliment we know how to recognise.
- 5Public appearances
- 8Laser strings
- 0Wrong notes
[ 05 / What it taught us ]
The lessons went back into the apps.
Constrain the scale, free the player.
Locking the harp to a scale meant nobody could play it badly. That idea — sensible defaults that get out of the way — is the single most underrated feature in every product we've shipped since.
Strangers are the best QA.
Public play at Noite Branca taught us more about voice-stealing than any amount of internal testing.
[ Credits ]
Built by two friends, on nights and weekends.
- Concept · Build
- Nuno Santos (Imaginando) · Rui Antunes (Analog Repair, Lisbon)
- Software voice
- DRC engine
- Frame · finishing
- Local workshop, Braga
- Selected for
- gnration · Laboratórios de Verão (open call)
- Appearances
- Noite Branca Braga · BMW 100 (Autódromo do Estoril) · Casa da Música, Porto · Galp Energia store opening · TEDx
- Photography
- Imaginando archive
