Musical
Ribbon
Initial Motivation
The
idea of our project is the use of a ribbon as a musical instrument.
Think
of how many different movements and shapes you can do with a ribbon. It can
be bent, you can form circles/waves/snakes/eights, and even more complex
shapes, or you can just move it up and down to form lines. The initial
motivation was to explore how this variety of movements and shapes could be
mapped to music, and see what kind of music or sound we could hear, since
these movements are random. More precisely, we wanted to see how these
different shapes could determine different aspects of music, e.g. dynamics,
volume, etc, or different types of sounds, or lastly different musical
patterns.
This
idea came to our mind by seeing the Rythmic gymnastics girls moving a ribbon
while the music is playing, as if the music would come naturally out
of it. Imagine if you could really play music with it, this would be even
more wonderful than seeing it.
What our instrument does
Our instrument produces sound when a coloured ribbon is moving in front of a camera. It detects, up to a certain point of accuracy, if the shape formed by the ribbon's movement is circular, and if this is the case it plays some midi generated sound, otherwise it doesn't. The pitch of the sound raises as the circle of the ribbon moves from the left to the right, the volume increases as the size of the circle increases, and lastly the musical pattern that is played with each circle is played faster when the circle is smaller and slower when it's bigger (with notes interfering due to small problems). With a ribbon the sound produced is quite random, but with a video animation of a moving circle, the sound is musical.
First
ideas for the project
Before choosing the idea of using a ribbon to produce music, we had first a few other ideas for this project. These are the following:
-
Dance or move to produce music.
-
Ride a bike. The speed of pedal could determine the tempo and the hands, by moving something like a break, could influence notes and volume.
-
Draw shapes or continuous lines and curves on the Smartboard.
-
Move a different book of a library with books of different colors to play a different note.
-
Move your nose to play music. This would be funny but also tiring for the user.
Reasons for preferring
the ribbon idea
We
chose to try to go for the ribbon idea, for several reasons. Some of the
ideas we had are already implemented or not too creative, like for example
dancing or drawing shapes. Just moving books from a library to play notes
would be very simple and easy to implement, but also quite boring. Finally,
we liked the idea of riding a bike, but with the equipment we have, we
wouldn’t have been able to implement it. But this idea too would not have
been too flexible in the way and variety of interaction. On the other hand a
ribbon is a flexible object that we wanted to take advantage of.
The
team
Georgia-Anna
Farmaki
Adem
Toprak