It was a dusty, crowded day at the open air electronics market on SJB road in Bangalore, and everything was dirt cheap. I had just finished buying everything I would need for a super simple soldering station. I walked into OM Electronics and bought several kits: heart beat detector, musical harmonium, I.R. beam break detector, etc. I intuited that each of these kits could lead to something with investigating the environment using sensors, my basic mission, though I didn’t know how I would use them yet. I spent the evening soldering them together, but most of them didn’t work. I took some pictures and emailed them to a friend for some help; it was my first time soldering “through whole” components. The next night I got one of them working, the harmonium, and played with it. The harmonium kit had several metal pads that could be touched with a metal wand to make a sound (kind of like piano keys). I noticed that if I held the wand and touched the keys with my hand, my body acted as a conductor and the piano still worked. Actually, not just my body, but any object that conducted electricity at all seemed to connect the circuit and make a sound if I just touched the object to the two sides of the circuit: wires, pennies, water, tea, dahl, plant leaves.
