MIDI Instrument Ideation & Early Testing / by Maya Pruitt

BACKGROUND

This semester, I joined the NYU Women's choir. With no formal music training, its been really fun learning more about sight singing and music notation. One of the most interesting aspects is that Solfege notes have a gestural visualization. Our choir director often has us simultaneously make these hand symbols while we sing. I liked the idea of having these gestures make sound directly. Like singing itself, you become your instrument.

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BOM

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I’ve purchased a few different sensors, because I don’t want to settle on anything just yet. I enjoy trying different sensors and want to experiment with their different inputs. However, I think nearly all of the gestures can be created with IMU input.

IMU TEST

Below is a video of converting IMU values to frequency to play different notes depending on angle/position of the Arduino Nano.

Reference: https://pypi.org/project/pysine/

QUESTIONS

In real life, holding ‘do’ at different heights represents an octave shift. The symbols are also universal because you can change key vocally.

How can these musical aspects be expressed in instrument form? Button to change octave/key? Acceleration?