I’ve built a music controller that senses hand movements, in a similar way to a Theremin, for an interactive musical installation dorkbot bristol is exhibiting at the BV Open Studios 2011 this October. I’m hoping that people will be able to have some fun playing with the sounds of some music sequences being synthesized on a Mac by moving their hands in front of it. It has two sensors that measure how far your hands are above the box so you can move your hands up and down to control different aspects of the synthesized sounds. There are also four touch sensors that change the sounds being played when you rest a finger on them.
The aim is that the player should be able to explore the sound with their hand movements, the hand movements do not create the music itself. In this way, it should not require any special musical skill so anyone can have a go and make nice sounds, unlike a musical instrument like the Theremin which requires skill to play a tune.
I wanted the hardware build to be as quick and simple as possible so the sensors are mounted in a cardboard box. The unit plugs into a Mac running Reaktor and controls the music being produced.
The sensors are connected to an Arduino Uno, which has some code to send the sensor data as serial data over USB to the Mac. On the Mac, the control and routing of the sensor data is handled by some code developed in Processing to send the sensor data as MIDI and OSC to Reaktor.
The electronics components used in this project are:
- Arduino Uno
- Seeed Twig I2C Touch Sensor Controller and 4 Sensors
- Seeed Stem Base Shield
- 2 Sharp 2Y0A21 Distance Sensors
Great idea, love the cardboard box packaging! Nice blog Arran, lots of fascinating projects!
Thanks! The cardboard box was the quickest way of getting it in a housing. Plus, the cardboard worked well with the capacitative touch sensors.
Pingback: BV Open Studios Weekend 2011 – Hand-Rolled Noise