Spring 2025 · NYU Tisch ITP

Feel the
music.

SquishyMusic is a squishable musical orb. Load any sound you want, then press, knead and squeeze it to play — light and audio responding to every gram of pressure.

Get early access Try the demo

Press and hold the orb →

Why it's different

An instrument you
hold like a stress ball.

No buttons. No screen. Just a soft, rubber-enclosed body that reads pressure anywhere across its surface and answers with sound and light.

Fully customizable audio

Map any sample, stem or synth patch to any pressure zone. Your kit, your rules — swap the whole sound palette in seconds.

Pressure-reactive everything

Peripheral circuits thread through the body. Squeeze harder, deeper, or in a new spot — the response changes with you.

Light you can feel

Diffused LEDs bloom through the translucent skin, turning the whole orb into a soft lamp that pulses with the sound.

Genuinely squishable

Built inside a Wubble — a big, forgiving rubber skin. Every component is rubber-enclosed, so it takes a real squeeze.

A hand squeezing the SquishyMusic orb as it glows blue and violet
The prototype in action
The translucent blue rubber skin held in one hand, without electronics
The skin, without the electronics
The rubber-enclosed primary circuit with smaller peripheral circuits on wires
The electronic heart

Interactive demo

Give it a squeeze.

Each pad is a pressure zone. Tap, hold, or use keys ASDFG.

Sound plays in your browser — no download required.

How we built it

An Arduino heart
in a rubber body.

SquishyMusic was built across two rounds of funding from the NYU Prototyping Fund. Both generations pair an Arduino microcontroller with a rubber-enclosed system of small circuits extending through the body — pressure on any of them triggers LED lights and user-selected audio. What changed between rounds was the skin: the first prototype borrowed its rubber shell from a Wubble, a children's toy; the second replaced it with an enclosure I modeled myself in Fusion 360 and had Poly Jet printed in Agilus 30 white, a flexible photopolymer, fitted precisely to the sensor layout it houses.

  • 01

    Primary circuit

    A rubber-sealed core carrying the microcontroller and audio output.

  • 02

    Peripheral sensors

    Smaller enclosed circuits fan out on flexible leads to reach the whole surface.

  • 03

    Enclosure, reengineered

    Round one's Wubble skin diffused light and cushioned the squeeze. Round two's custom shell does the same job with a fit designed around the sensors themselves.

Close-up of the round-two primary circuit: an Arduino Nano ESP32 wired on a prototyping shield

Round two, up close

Four individual pressure-sensor pads with blue LEDs, wired together on the workbench
Peripheral sensors, wired and lit
Three sensor pods wired to an Arduino on a breadboard during early testing
Early sensor-array test rig

The details

Specs

Brain
Arduino microcontroller
Body — round one
Off-the-shelf Wubble rubber shell
Body — round two
Custom shell, Poly Jet printed in Agilus 30 white
Input
Distributed pressure circuits, rubber-enclosed
Output
User-selected audio + reactive LEDs
Audio
Fully customizable sample set
Design tool
Autodesk Fusion 360
Funding
NYU Prototyping Fund, 2 rounds
Status
Working prototype, Spring 2026

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