Digital Music Interface – Ulrich Lehner

For the lecture Interactivity and Music Interfaces at the Vienna University of Technology we prototyped a touch-sensitive and orientation-aware music interface including five keys. The physical prototype was developed on-top of the Arduino platform with simple capacity sensors attached to recognize touch-events CapSense library). As an additional sensor we included a smart phone in the case to take orientation and acceleration into account for the music composition. However when we tested the device we found it more practical to hold the key-device in one hand and the phone in the other, or even give the devices to two persons (which led to interesting collaboration while creating music). Sound synthesizes was achieved with SuperCollider through a serial com-port connection to the music device. The five keys were mapped to a pentatonic scale (which had to be loaded with SuperCollider) while the smart phone was connected via TouchOSC to alter pitch and volume of the played ton.