The “Walking Piano,” as he called it, was born. Saraceni also made it more practical to play, scrapping the mattress pads for plastic paneling and a slender frame. With the help of just his assistant, he painted the mattress black and white and, after more electrical experimenting, the piece of furniture eventually turned into a keyboard prototype that looked much closer to a real instrument. “I thought with my assistant, ‘I know, let’s make look like a piano,’” Saraceni tells me. Inside Saraceni’s 20,000-square-foot Philadelphia workshop-a loft filled with motion-sensor gadgets and light installations-sat a white, vinyl, tented pop-out futon for overnight guests and workers. The daisy morphed into a musical carpet a few years later, and then inspiration truly struck. Enamored of the invention and its interactivity, he spent the next decade making variations of Musical Daisy, leaning on his electronics expertise to refine his creative and sensory invention. Saraceni, an Italian immigrant who moved to the United States in 1965, believed it encouraged conversation and represented “the fact that technology was a playful thing to explore the possibility of expanding yourself,” he says. The soft, interactive sculpture featured eight petals, each containing a different musical note, and each activated by the weight of someone walking or sitting on it. Musical Daisy, which debuted at the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum in 1970, was inventor Remo Saraceni’s first major technological achievement. Before the Big Piano was “the Big Piano,” it was a collection of large pillows in the shape of a giant flower.
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