Welcome To The Draw Piano Homepage!

!	DIS II - Project during the summer term 2004

The Draw Piano

by Immo Köster & René Reiners

Experience a new Look&Feel on any touchscreen!
Play more than 200 instruments with the same device
Dynamic playing by changing pitch, velocity and the tact rate of your instrument while you're playing!
Variable sustain for each instrument without the need of an additive pedal
Make basic use of drumkits
Future plans: Extensions like real sustain pedals or more than one input pen and support for more than one player
Check out our news site!

So, what's it all about and what do I need?

The Draw Piano project tries to overcome the known obstacles of getting basic harmonies out of standard music instruments such as keyboards, horns or guitars. This is especially useful for the music newbie who only has little or no experience on playing an instrument but who already wants to have certain successes at the very beginning. Only after some minutes of playing with the appropriate instrument, the musician is able to produce harmonically sounding arrangements or even small pieces.

Little or no experience in instruments is needed but basic knowledge and a feeling for sounds and notes is helpful (an will surely be gained after some practice).

Set-Up

The main input device is a touch-screen with a minimum resolution of 1024x768 (higher resolutions are supported by the Draw Piano). Using the touch-screen's pens or your fingers one triggers the generation of sounds. You can drag around or shortly point somewhere - depending on your position, a corresponding note will be played.

The Draw Piano was realized using the Cycling '74 tool Max/MSP which offers an incredible amount of objects that allow the manipulation of MIDI notes or sound by catching input from a wide range of devices. Its easy drag & drop approach makes the entry into this world of creating music much easier than other music programming tools do. For more information check out the Cycling '74 website.

In order to orientate oneself and not to be forced to play blindly, we developed a board design the user should interact with to get into touch with the instrument. The picture which is displayed full-screen should give the user an intuitive feeling of how to make use of the Draw Piano. In the background a MIDI sequencer (like Apple's Garage Band) should already be launched. So in order to achieve a good playing experience you should launch the three applications (Max/MSP Runtime with the patch, a fullscreen-capable picture viewer and e.g. GarageBand).

For a detailed description of how to operate the instrument check the manual section.

Please also take a look at the technical section where we describe, besides the technical aspects, the problems and challenges we encountered.

Greetings, I. Köster & R. Reiners

!	Direct access

Download the Max/MSP trial demo from the Cycling '74 Homepage
Download >>

Download the patch file for the Draw Piano together with the interaction picture in one package!
Using the picture is recommended so that you do not get lost while playing. It provides a pretty good visual impression of the instument. The experimental patch to generate synthesized sounds with mouse movements (some call it the "R2D2"-simulator). Download >>

(Immo.Koester@RWTH-Aachen.de, Rene.Reiners@RWTH-Aachen.de)