Designing Interactive Systems II - Summer Semester 2005 RWTH Aachen
Final Project: New Interfaces for Musical Expression
Project members: Rene Bohne, Sven Kratz and Damian Lubosch
We will use two cams, one foot pedal and one mic. The cams will capture the position of the (ping-pong) bats relative to the user. Both sides of the bats can be used to change the instrument or the sound (or volume). The mic will capture the sound information made when the user is stomping the feet. This can be used for generating special fx or rhythms. The foot pedal can control even more effects or manipulate the sound. (e.g. compression filter, distortion level...)
people from 5-100 years old, able to stand up and having two arms moved... The instrument is for all users who like to make music by moving all parts of their bodies.
Brief introduction describing what your instrument does, and the motivation behind your idea.
The first idea for "music with bubbles" was a pipe filled with water and a flexible tube which is used to blow air into the water. So the user blows air into the tube and the results are bubbles. We wanted to use a camera and analyze the bubbles on the water surface. We wanted to create sounds by the resulting captured data.
This was very complicated and there was no control for reconstructing the bubbles in exactly the same way as before. So there was no chance in playing the same song twice. And so there was no chance for the user to learn the instrument. It was a good engineering challenge, but a bad instrument.
Feel free to watch the prototype video (external link (20MB))
We like the pipe and it's colored light, so we wanted to create a new instrument with it. This time the user should be able to learn the instrument. So our idea was very simple and maybe not new, but the resulting instrument is easy to use: The user can control the pitch of a tone by sliding his hand up and down the tube. So there is a natural boundary and the user can see and feel and hear where the lowest and the highest tone are located: the lowest tone is at the bottom of the pipe and from there on, all tones are higher.
The user can't play lower tones than the bottom of the pipe and he can't play higher tones than the one at the upper ending of the pipe. So the user can play in a predefined pitch only. He can even play two tones at once if he has two hands. Using other parts of the body is also possible. If you have 12 parts of your body that you can bring in front of the pipe then you can play 12 different tones at the same time. But an easier way for doing this is: move your whole body in front of the pipe or: use your little finger and hold it directly in front of the camera ;) But the easiest and maybe most funny way to do it is with a second player. So, you can even play collaborative chords!
Changing the pitch is a nice feature but music needs rhythm. So the user hits the foot pedal and then the current tone(s) plays. Stomping is a very natural way of expressing rhythm so we think that this is a good way. But other than on a piano or most other instruments you only have one trigger for all the tones. This makes it an ideal instrument for beginners but most professionals might want to express their creativity with a more advanced instrument.
Another a special feature is the possibility to change the sound of the instrument: pushing the red button will change the sound of the pipe. So the pipe can sound like a piano or like a guitar. Four different colors indicate which instrument (sound) is currently selected.
For us an instrument is not limited to sound but also the visual components like light and color are important. Playing with the red instrument might have a different effect on the audience than using the blue instrument for the same melody. The bubbles, which are issued from the base of the instrument in rhythm to the music, and the color of the light are highlighting the music and the overall performance.
A high-level list of tasks your accomplished for your project.
brainstorming: finding the right idea for an instrument when developing this instrument we found out about some problems and so we redeveloped the design
Brief description of any specific problems/challenges you encountered.
Electronic engineering problem: using the Teleo module to use AC currents for the pipe as the Teleo module can be only used with DC currents. The solution for this is to use relays which separates the power networks.
Possibilities for future work.
The next step would be: get rid of the camera and the calibration process. Using some other physical effects on the pipe might do the job and increase the mobility of the instrument. We can imagine to use touch sensitive buttons which we can glue on the pipe for example. Integration of the logic into the pipe is possible. We tried to do so as you can see on our prototype. So you need no mac with max/msp when you want to play your bubble-icious pipe. For doing so we would need a special kind of programmable module.
Tunings
In the current version we use a C-pentatonic: CDEGA. As the lowest tone is E5, you can play from the
bottom of the pipe up to the top of the pipe in the second inversion of this pentatonic. This is the "Jao" Inversion, meaning:
EGACD. As you might know, this is a minor pentatonic which is popular in chinese folk music.
The composition of the light, the color for the instrument, the bubbles and this pentatonic and the feel of the pipe makes BubbleIcious a very relaxing instrument.
It is easy to play as you can't make as many errors as possible on a piano or any other real 12tone instrument. Though, to the european user this instrument might not sound very familiar.
But: This is just a preset. In future versions of the instrument it is possible to change the tuning of the instrument. Up to 12 different tones are allowed on other scales.
For a quick start with the pipe, look at the following pictures:
On the left picture you can see: the user can't really know which note he is playing. The camera divides the pipe in 12 zones and our patch knows, that the user is playing a "C". The user has to learn where which note is located. But that's true for most instruments. Many popular instruments like a piano or a guitar offer aditional information to the user: a key or a fret, so the musician knows where a tone beginns and where it ends... In a future version some indicators like lines (or colored zones) on the pipe would be a great help for the user.
List of references.
Links to your Max/MSP patches
Our patch