Music Glove

Malte playing on a well known
object using the music glove

This is the website for the music glove project lead by..

• Malte Weiß
• Gero Herkenrath
• Tobias Schierge

.. computer science students at RWTH Aachen.

The music glove is our final project for the DIS2-lecture held by Prof. Borchers at RWTH Aachen.

During the project we are challenged to create a new interface for a musical instrument.

What is it?

This new interface is what we call the music glove.

Gero: "talk to the hand!"

Its basic idea is to let people make music on any real object while wearing a comfortable glove. Depending on how many fingertips touch an item another note is played on the attached computer's midi system. The volume of the notes is defined by the force the fingertips apply to the object.

Additionally different objects will produce different kinds of sound, e.g. mimicing a guitar, a violin, etc. This can be changed in the software running on the attacked computer.

The best is that the items themselves are interchangeable, since they become instruments by putting a sticker on them, putting that sticker on something else makes the new item an instrument!

ToDo's

Mainly the following high level tasks had to be accomplished during our project work:

1. getting the idea for the music glove
2. thinking about different ways to make it happen, finally deciding for Teleo + RFID
3. writing the patch in MAX/MSP
4. writing the MAX/MSP extension for the RFID reader
5. building the glove
6. testing its usability (still not completely done)

Challenges/Problems

Some aspects required a more detailed focus:

• figuring out how to write an extension for MAX/MSP; we did it in Java (see software)
• figuring out how to connect the force sensors with threshold resistors to the Teleo Module (see hardware)
• putting the RFID reader into the glove

• Design Process
  Design and conceptualization of our project
• Technical Background
  Detailed technical information on the music glove project.
• Future Work
  Where does the music glove go tommorow?
• Sitemap
  A structured table of contents