It was in high school when Andrew Little first developed a passion — and a bit of a problem — for discovering instruments and trying to play them.

Little participated in the New London Talent Show as a junior and senior at The Williams School.

“That really opened my eyes,” Little said.

Fast forward a few years and Little, now a music and creative writing double major at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., was recently reading about a Lumatone, an electronic instrument that produces notes based on a color microtonal scale.

It was the price — about $4,500 — that made him do a double-take, and gave him a bit of inspiration.

“It went from, ‘I want that instrument’ to getting to work trying to figure (it) out,” said Little, a senior from Noank.

Earlier this summer, Little began a project to create his own instrument, based on a Lumatone, but using the whole color spectrum.

He started out using a MIDI keyboard, which has to be plugged into a computer or a synthesizer, and used the eight drum pads on the side of the keyboard to correspond with the ROY G BIV colors of the rainbow, adding Cyan in between green and blue to make eight colors to easier work with the eight drum pads.

Then came the hard part.

Little and Ryan Carter, an assistant professor of music at Hamilton and the project’s faculty adviser, programmed everything into the MIDI keyboard using Max, software that Little described as a “visual programming environment for music and sounds.”

Little said Carter was integral to the project.

“Once it was done being programmed, the work was a lot less intensive and a lot more trial and error,” Little said.

Now, Little has a fully functional instrument, as well as two finished pieces and a third he hopes to finish soon.

“It functions a lot differently (than a Lumatone),” Little said. “The way to play it is definitely different. It’s like a synthesizer with more notes.”

Little descibes the sounds as dissonant and ambient. He has commissioned a fellow Hamilton student, Charlie Guterman, with creating three different art pieces centered around different color palettes, which will determine what notes Little can use to create compositions.

Little hopes to exhibit their work in Hamilton’s Kennedy Center for Theatre and the Studio Arts.

In the meantime, he is going to spend a lot of time in the studio tinkering with his creation. Then it’s on to a senior project — producing an album for some of his peers with the help of an Emerson Foundation Grant he received.

“What I’ve learned in my musical career so far is that whenever you can, limit yourself in a certain way that pushes you to do more with what you have,” Little said.

Some information was provided by Hamilton College.