Technical Advice - David Merrill MIT MediaLab

Last week we contacted David Merill, an MIT PhD student who Dave met on a visit to the MediaLab Boston in March. We asked him for technical advice on implementing our prototype.

He advised that for interfacing percussive sensors to a computer, we could probably get by with multiple Arduinos if we sample quickly enough, or build a little pulse-stretching circuitry for our sensors. There is a growing community of Arduino users out there, so we'd likely be able to find someone who's already done something like what we're after. He advised that there are commercial interfaces that are designed specifically to detect impacts, such as the DM5 from Alesis ,but those would probably be more expensive.

He advised also that we'd be better off using Piezos rather than FSRs to detect impact, since they are more sensitive to percussive gesture. FSR might be better suited to aftertouch, or more long time-scale actions.

He also recommended we only use one sensor per bar because if we have a rigid bar, we're likely to get a similar signal from each sensor if we place multiple piezos on it, so a single one may be enough. this is worth testing to see what works best.

In terms of sound, he advised that mapping gesture to sound is where the real "art" of making a musical interfaces comes in - it's simultaneously the most important element of the design, and the one that is the most difficult to offer good advice about.

His final piece of advice was try lots of different possibilities, work with other people to get feedback along the way (especially musicians), and make sure the instrument remains nimble. ( i.e. able to start and stop sounds quickly, and able to expressively shape sounds in some way)

Thanks to David Merill!

Chris H

Possible Capabilities of Multimba

Through months of research so far, we have looked at several possible capabilities for our instrument:
-Velocity and pressure sensitivity
-Creating vibrato or pitch bend by mallet along bar
-Reversing notes - it would be interesting to see how music might sound when bars are reversed.
-Multi-instrumental
-Ability to create dynamic graphical representation of the sound produced.
With further research we hope to discover other potential functionality we could include.

3D Models

Using 3D Studio Max as part of the Workshop module we created a number of potential device and environment designs.
devices
3D(Metal)

and 2D(Paper)


performance environments
Semi-dome - Ideally we would like the user to be to feel surrounded by the performance.


Enclosed Space - Probably a more realistic and practical setup than the semidome.



3 Screens - Another option


We designed a menu system in Director to view animations of these models. http://richie.idc.ul.ie/~hackettc/Thesis/3DMenu.exe

Lo-Fi Director Prototype

Here is a simple lo-fi prototype we created in Director as a proof of design for the Workshop module. Click on image to open Director .exe file. It consists of 25 synthetic Marimba sounds taken from Logic, and 25 gifs created in Photoshop. We mapped images to the rising notes on the 3rd and 4th octaves of the Marimba. As the notes get higher, the colour, sharpness, size, speed, and amount of circles all change.

http://richie.idc.ul.ie/~hackettc/Thesis/Prototype.exe