Meta stairs is a musical interactive installation we developed at SCRIME for the Nuit des Escaliers 2025, an event organized by the Opéra de Bordeaux in the framework of the Journées du Patrimoine 2025 and presented to the public on the 20th of September 2025 at the Pôle Juridique et Judidiaire of the University of Bordeaux.
The installation is made of two parts :
During the first development phase of the project, I supervised an intern from the engineering school ENSEIRB-MATMECA whose mission was to create a prototype of the installation : assemble the electronic parts, write a minimal firmware for the controller and a Python program implementing a first selection of three modes.
When he was mostly done I contributed to the Arduino and Python code, providing a reliable, self-calibrating MIDI device firmware with a pretty fine velocity detection from the raw FSR signals. I also cleaned the Python code a bit, externalized the audio rendering and added more interpretation modes and submodes.
For the Nuit des Escaliers event, the audio engine playing the transformed MIDI notes was a Reaper session using a bunch of Pianoteq plugin instances, with a specific virtual instruments per interpretation mode.
The whole project is open source : the hardware is based on a Teensy (Arduino compatible) electronic board and FSR sensors, and the software is a Python program implementing some of the modes (direct scales, shepard scale, slowly evolving triads with tonnetz constraints), or routing MIDI messages to other external softwares such as Web Midifile Performer or the Meta impro programe written by Florent Donat-Bouillud during his internship at SCRIME in 2025.
