The hand has incredibly expressive ability. In music, this expressiveness is often realized through the interaction with musical instruments, which take on a wide variety of shapes, feels, and constructs. These aspects have evolved (and are still evolving) out of iterations of design, use, and re-design to fit the physical needs of musicians. The form of an instrument generally follows its function. (Interestingly, how an instrument is played (or may be played) is then a function of its form).

Taking this idea, we ask the following question:

"Can we build an physical instrument whose function follows form, instead of the other around? That is, can the expressive gamut of an instrument be varied depending the form of what is being played?"

We propose to design and build an "instrument" which attempts to provide a YES (or at least MAYBE) answer to the question above.

The hand-strument (for a lack of better name) is a musical input device that fits on the hand, has no intrinsic form or shape of its own (beyond that of the hand). It is played on any concrete object with arbitrary shape, texture, softness, and potentially any other physical qualities that is can be manipulated and detected by the hand.

The first prototype of such an instrument, which we propose to build, will resemble an open-air glove, which gathers the following data:

• pressure applied at each finger tip
• pressure applied at the palm
• small continuous vibrations on the hand
• orientation of the hand (up or down)

These data will be used to parameterize the qualities of the objects and the way with which the hand is interfacing it. These data would be processed mapped to some scheme to expressively control elements of sound, such as pitch, timbre, volume, attack, and or any other parameters.

finger beatz, a consumer toy glove that have switches on on the finger tips, several sets of sounds to cycle through, and a built-in speaker. Perry got this for us to learn and play with. It will serve as a simplified model to study and start from.

while Newton Armstrong (osc controller), Paul Botelho (viol), and I are attempting independent ideas, we will help each other out in doing our projects. Jay Daniel (spectrogoo) will also help with aspects of circuit design even though we have no help of much value in return for him (thank you jay). Tae Hong Park is also working on a similar project involving hands. So we are all going to help each other out.

• Fingertip mounted FSR (one for each finger)
• FSR at the palm (mounted by strap)
• Piezo-electric sensors that run along the back of the fingers and hand
• Accelerometer mounted on the back of hand
• Light frame for mounting sensors
• Wire attached unit for circuits.

• drivers to communicate with the device
• design of protocol
• low level library which implements the protocol
• real-time application framework and API
• sample application

• multiple subjects (both those that play instruments and those that do not)
• musical input on hard flat surface
• a variety of shapes (jagged, sphere, flat, curved)
• a variety of textures (smooth, coarse)
• a variety of softness (rubber, foam, etc.), probably using a sphere
• shaking the handing
• test on materials (sand, and so on)
• latency

• low latency, precise musical input
• comfort in physical design
• modularity and portability (both hardware and software)
• a observable sensitivity of the device when used on different shapes, textures, and softness, that can be used to control various expressive aspects in musical input.

--- 12/3/2001 (1 week)
Preliminary Hardware Design
Preliminary Software Design (include protocol)

--- 12/7/2001 (2 weeks)
Acquire components

--- 1/7/2002 (2 weeks)
Build hand-strument prototype for one hand
Build circuit and communication

--- 1/7/2002 (2 weeks)
Implement driver
Implement protocol
Implement library/API

--- 1/28/2002 (2 weeks)
Hardware / software integration
Test

--- 2/14/2002 (2 weeks)
Develop test application
Test

--- ???
Release!