Sebastian Thinggaard Rostved is a musical fanatic. He’s designed soundscapes for the Botanical Garden, Copenhagen, worked with studio production and produced game audio. He is currently pursuing his sound design dream at Sonic College and was presented with a specific challenge: “Design and construct a device that you could use to alter some sound”. Sick of the normal “potentiometers, sliders, antennas or ribbons” found on most mixers, he decided on something more fluid—the human hand.
Sebastian started with a set of gloves and Arduino for the hardware, knowing he would connect to MaxMSP (Max for Live plug-in) for the audio effects. He used two flex sensors, an accelerometer and force sensing resistors. Here’s the description on how this affects the audio.
The two bend sensors control the filter cutoff and the amount of filter envelope. The force sensitive resistor controls the amount of filter and amp envelope and the accelerometer controls the filter resonance, overdrive and bitcrush.
Although Sebastian looks pretty subdued here operating his tunes, you can see there is the potential to program larger gestures with the accelerometer and really turn this into an interactive show. There is also room for adding some capacitive sensing fabric buttons on the glove, as well as more flex sensors. This could trigger more effects or music samples. On the visual end, it may be fun to add a few LEDs to the fingertips to draw attention to the motions, as well. It looks like Sebastian has a lot of possibilities! If you are a music lover, you should check out our learning guide for the MIDI Drum Glove. Transform the tapping at your desk into cool beats using a FLORA microcontroller and some piezos.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!