Folding Music

Ariana Grande performed No Tears Left To Cry on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon using a Nintendo Labo piano—which is cardboard. The Roots kept time. It sounded good. No one treated it as a novelty. It just was.

Nintendo Labo is the company’s experiment in making instruments from paper. You fold cardboard into a piano, a robot, a fishing rod. The Switch reads your movements and translates them into sound and image. In theory it sounds like a toy. In practice, it works.

What struck me was how casually it happened. Here’s a pop star performing on mainstream television using equipment made of folded cardboard, and there’s no wink at the audience, no acknowledgment of the absurdity. Gaming’s been mainstream for years, but there’s still a gap between what gamers know is possible and what the broader culture accepts as legitimate. Nintendo Labo closing that gap by reducing music-making to paper and software felt significant.

The boundaries between real instruments and experimental ones have been softening for a while. But watching Ariana Grande at a cardboard piano, actually playing music, made it click for me in a way I hadn’t fully registered before. The most accessible creative tool right now is literally folded paper. Not expensive software, not gear locked behind paywalls, not technology you need special knowledge to understand. Paper and code.

I keep coming back to what it means that Nintendo chose to make creative tools feel like nothing at all—no pretense, no you’re now using professional equipment. Just fold, play, make. The cardboard doesn’t announce itself. It just lets you create.