Seungmin and I are teaming up for our midterm project! It all started as an idea of mine to make an instrument using the knowledge we have learned in PComp. Talking with Seungmin about this idea she showed her interest into developing it together, which is a huge honor for me.
The first thing we talked about was: which was the purpose of this instrument, the story behind it? We discussed about creating an instrument that could be friendly and easy to play, that feels more like a toy for newbies but that also could be used for real playability and expression as well for more experienced musicians. Moreover, we wanted to create a unique and fun instrument that could be played and used in unique/unconventional ways, giving a shot into innovating with the resources that we posses. For this to be done, we later discussed about the concept behind how to achieve this and what could we do to succeed. We talked about what we call the white keys concept. For me, the white keys concept comes from the simple idea of how easy is to play C major scale (formed only with white keys), being the first scale that almost every musician learns if they’re piano players, more specifically. It is easy because you don’t have to think about any flat or sharp notes, just the white notes being the degrees of the C major scale. If the harmony stays there, you’re in key and it will sound just fine! With this in mind, what about managing the scales so that you can play every scale with this concept?
Because of this we thought about a system that allows us to change keys easily. We have a couple of ideas like using buttons that allows us to change to any of the 12 keys available. For this midterm we could definitely try at least 4 while we define the best way to make those changes (buttons or other sensors). This could impact the accesibility of the instrument drastically. But what about making it fun to play with?
We came with the inspiration of the otamatone. The otamatone, is a very simple instrument that allows you to press a slider that activates and snaps a tone to any of the musical notes available. Other funny fact is that it has a mouth-like face that can modulate the sound depending in how much you open it, like a vocoder filter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_ILdh1K0Fk
It controls the volume by a potentiometer in the back and has a couple of other functionalities built in depending on the version you buy. The otomatone has the notes displayed in a chromatic fashion, meaning that it has available, all of the 12 notes at the same time, similar to what a violin would do.
In our instrument, we would like to modulate sound parameters in a different way than the otomatone, as well as keep the white keys concept for it to be easy to play. We want to be able to interact with 4 parameters of the sound:
The sensors we include in our instrument would somehow determine how to activate the note. Would it be like the otomatone, when the note/tone is selected and pressed? Or could we have any other sensor that activates the note but also controls the volume of the sound? Which could give us more expression and playability? That’s what we are discovering and experimenting with at the moment.
Thinking about sensors, we collaborated in a research on which could be the best sensors to use for this. I had a chat with Danny Rozin and Octavio who gave me great ideas and insights about which libraries to use/learn from like the Volume Library as well as sensor ideas like the stretch sensor or linear potentiometer. On the other hand, Seungmin contributed with an extensive research of sensors that could be fun to play and experiment with but also have the characteristics that we believe are the most suitable for our experiment. We’ll share the link with that research.
https://www.notion.so/Sensor-Search-284d33cc9e878008860cc2e74d73dcb4?source=copy_link