Assignment: Instrument 2 again (or a 3rd)

Choose one of the following prompts:

• Iterate on Instrument 2, refining the components you paid less attention to this week. For example:
  • Focus on the controller: Do you need to smooth your sensor’s input? Average it? If you are using thresholds, what are they? Do they need calibrating?
  • Re – Focus on the sound generation:
    • What ranges do the parameters you are controlling currently vary within? Try different ranges. Try inverting them. Try controlling different parameters.
    • Try different instrument presets, find two presets that contrast with each other, interpolate between them.
    • Using the same interface, try controlling wildly different instruments.
• Create a new instrument, with a different interface.
  • Test a new sensor or gesture
  • Take an old idea and re-focus on either sound or fabrication

In either case, how can you make your interface feel more like an instrument

Gesture? Sound? Feedback?

For weeks 3 and 4 I decided to try something different from my first two projects that were web and p5.js based and focus on Arduino. I wanted to continue off of the tennis racquet idea I began to outline in the previous blog.

What I Did

Gesture Ideas

• Use racquet handle as neck of guitar
  • Push buttons or switches along here will control the note or chord that is being played
• Use face of tennis racquet with strings for where to “strum” or trigger sounds
• Future ideas:
  • Rotating the racquet
  • Bouncing a ball of the racquet
  • Hitting the edge vs the strings

Material

• Tennis string material is made of nylon

  Strings (tennis)

• I had some copper tape I thought I could use for creating a switch or potentiometer

MIDI Mapping

• This is a demo I recorded during a songwriting course with Bartees Strange last year with my friends at School of Song. I recorded it in Logic Pro X with two tracks and

  Champion (Bartees HW 1).mp3

• I liked the idea of basing a whole instrument off of of one theme or idea of a song. This song seemed to fit not only for the tennis lyrics theme and inspiration but also since the song is based off of a repeating bass line it could be faster for me to get better at performing on a new instrument I create.

  • With this idea I thought that I could hard code the buttons to match the bass notes in the song. I began by figuring out which notes I needed for the chorus and then set up those notes as push buttons on the breadboard
  • B Ab Gb Ab B