YT Guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUDOLJ1Ki84

The usual input device for playing a synthesizer is the good old piano keyboard. However, you don’t have to stick to such pedestrian interfaces when making music. [Daisy] has a fun build that shows us how to put together a ribbon synth that makes wonderful little noises.

Naturally, the heart of the build is a ribbon potentiometer (also known as soft pots). It’s essentially a touch sensitive strip that changes in resistance depending on where you touch it. You can slide your finger up and down to vary the output continuously; in musical contexts, they can behave rather like a fretless instrument. [Daisy] employs one of these potentiometers in such a role by hooking it up to a Daisy Seed microcontroller board, which reads it with an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The resistance values are used to vary the pitch of a dual-saw synthesizer programmed in the plugdata framework.