Priorities:
Flex Sensors to continuous sound
Pressure Sensors to one-shot sound
Wearability (building w/o breadboard, wire-wrapping, soldering)
wifi connection
Key idea: body is interface between experience and environment. Music influences movement of body and experience of mind. What if we can reverse this? Experience and expression through movement modifies environment — feedback in both directions, via body and movement as interface.
https://instrumentsofthings.com/pages/services
Overview
We started off with brainstorming ideas about embodiment and unity, also talking about mind body connection and neuroscience. We also started off with talking about the idea of body perfection and how we can merge visuals, sounds, and body interaction to convey our ideas into reality. This week we’ve been working a lot on also exploring and experimenting with possible elements, forms, and structures about the performance project.
The core of this still unveiling concept lies in the connection between the body and the machine, or more specifically, between a dancer’s movements and interactive media. We started off by thinking about the body’s movements and how to interpret them to a signal that can be read by a microcontroller.
We decided to focus on two main types of movements or “events” - a “one hit” movement such as a clap or a stomp, and a continuous movement e.g. waving hands up and down. These different types of movements call for different reactions on the part of the sound and image and can be best interpreted to an electric signal by different sensors. The first short movements can be easily picked up by a pressure sensor or an accelerometer, whereas the latter continuous movements would require a flex sensor. Unfortunately, two long expected flex sensors are yet to arrive, so we emulated their behavior with a potentiometer for now.
Next, we needed to use these signals to manipulate or generate sound and image. We started with the sound/music aspect which is more familiar to us and managed to communicate with our preferred music production software Ableton Live. This allowed us to create both “one hit” sounds using a pressure sensor, and to create and manipulate sound continuously using a potentiometer.
The next steps would be to physically connect the sensors to the dancer’s body, stabilize and tune the whole set up, and of course create the sound and images that correspond to the dancer’s movements.