Digital Music Interface
A touch-sensitive, orientation-aware physical music controller with five capacitive keys, built for the lecture Interactivity and Music Interfaces at the Vienna University of Technology.
For the lecture Interactivity and Music Interfaces at the Vienna University of Technology we prototyped a touch-sensitive, orientation-aware music interface with five keys. The physical build sits on top of the Arduino platform, with simple capacitive sensors detecting touch events (via the CapSense library). A smartphone embedded in the case adds orientation and acceleration as additional musical inputs. In testing it turned out more natural to hold the key device in one hand and the phone in the other, or to pass them to two players entirely, which made for some interesting collaborative play.
Sound synthesis was handled in SuperCollider, talking to the device over a serial connection. The five keys were mapped to a pentatonic scale (loaded into SuperCollider at startup), and the smartphone, connected via TouchOSC, modulated pitch and volume of the played tone.
The project was built together with
- Boris Dabrowski
- Jakob Frohnwieser
- Dominik Hofer
Technologies used:
- Arduino
- SuperCollider
- TouchOSC
The clip below demonstrates the capacitive sensors:
And here is the device in action: