Project Proposal

Our idea of a new handsome instrumental interface is what we call a music glove.

General concept

This new music instrument will consist of a glove and several items, simple geometric forms like cubes and balls. Sound will then be produced as soon as a user wearing the glove picks up one of these items.

Depending on the number of fingertips that actually touch the item another tone will be played. Of course one needs at least two fingers to grip the item, thus the thumb is supposed to always touch an item together with any other finger, no finger will produce any sound alone.

Depending on our success in building such a glove and items we will eventually build two gloves so a user can make music with both hands. The different item effects will be producing different kinds of sound, e.g. may a cube produce guitar-like sound but a ball drums instead. Using two gloves one can then actually play two different instruments at the same time!

Technical background

The most unusual aspect of the system is of course the glove itself, which requires to go a bit more in detail here:

A rough music glove prototype

Using a simple glove as base we plan to put little contacts at its fingertips, probably each fingertip contact will be connected to a different pin of the used input port. The contact at the thumb is going to be special in a way that is provides voltage.

The items we will use are supposed to be conductive so the signal of any other fingertip contact that touches the item together with the thumb will be set to 1. By this we can produce 16 different notes, theoretically. The practical amount of notes that can be produced will be less, since there has to be at least one other finger apart from the thumb touching the item to not lose the grip on it.

How many notes we will be able to produce will show once we start to prototype, so far we expect about 13. To figure out which item the user picks and lifts up we will use a similar way, hardwiring it to one pin of the used port and checking whether its signal is 1 (user is touching the item with the thumb, i.e. holding it) or 0 (item still lies on ground).