Li'l Scratcher

🎹🎛️🎚️📀 An Instagram AR experience that transforms any surface into an interactive musical beat lab, letting you channel your inner DJ with turntables, drum machines, and trippy visual effects.

AR Music Creation

I loved this project. Developed in Spark AR for Instagram’s AR platform, this project was the result of Kirin Robinson pushing for little musical toy ideas. I think he had this one in his back pocket for a while, and when the opportunity came to jam on it, we all jumped at it.

Three Modules 🎹

Li’l Scratcher transforms any surface into a little interactive music lab! 🎵 You can place, arrange, and interact with three little modules that provide just enough functionality to put together some instantly infectious grooves.

Select your favorite rhythm track. Pick from different samples and scratch, and effect it all on the touch screen effects pad.

Oh, and when the shader effects kick in, that’s when things really get trippy.✌️

Sound and Vision

Anthony, with his music and audio background, solved complex timing control problems in Spark AR, using reactive (not React) JavaScript, which, while it does have its benefits, is not suited for looping multitrack audio synced with visual effects.

He came up with some novel patch solutions I chose to not understand and just accept that it works.

Team Contributions

On this one, I set up the scene interactions, touch interactions for each unit, and the object placement—which I wanted to feel like it was giving you a toy version of a real production studio. You’ve got your little setup on your desk, you’re a tiny DJ now. The interactions were full screen and not dependent on the size of the object in the viewport, so you could really get in there and play without precision-tapping tiny controls.

I also worked on the object material shaders and contributed to the psycho mode shader effect (group efforts on those). But my favorite thing to make was the visual echo chamber—that scene distortion effect where everything trails and smears when you really get going. There’s something so satisfying about cranking up a beat and watching the whole world melt around it.

Haolin Fang modeled each unit and set up the basic Spark assets. Kirin helped with the visualizer and I’m almost certain came in with a patch-based state engine for this one. If not, it happened often enough it’s worth mentioning.

Big thanks to everyone who worked on Li’l Scratcher! This one was fun!

Credits.