Project Title
Theremin Jacket
Team Member
Jeff Ma, Junda Chen, William Black, Yudong Huang
Project Description
1) What does our project do?
The concept of Theremin Jacket comes from the Theremin, an electronic musical instrument that could be controlled without physical contact by the performer. Thus, the Theremin Jacket we want to make allows the wearer to control an external connected MIDI to play music without any physical contact.
2) Who is our project for?
Theremin Jacket is for people who are fans of music, or more specifically, fans of the electronic musical instrument Theremin. It could also provide a chance to those without any experience of playing musical instrument to play music.
3) Describe how someone would use the developed device. What are the steps that a user would go through to interface with the technology?
First, there will be a switch on the jacket that allows wearers to turn on/off the circuit. When circuit is on, sensors on the jacket will read positions of wearers’ hands and arms in real time. After that, those data will be transmitted to the external connected MIDI through bluetooth and the MIDI will receive and play corresponding tones.
Besides the features mentioned above, we might also want to allow wearers to play different type of sounds by moving different parts of body instead of just two arms (ex. Playing drum by moving one foot up and down). We could also try allowing user store customize MIDI instrumental sounds in an external device and display sounds by speaker or earphone.
4) What makes your project different from existing products?
As we have researched so far, we have not found a wearable technology that support Theremin and MIDI music that allows user to move and control the flow of music. There are products that allow user to move but produce funny music (e.g. movement jacket), and products that allow user to control music but in a fixed, not fully interact-able way (e.g. arm MIDI keyboard, MIDI shirt, etc).
Our project aims to provide an easy to control interface to detect user hand movement. User adjust pitch by putting hands in different heights ( or different relative position from the other device ) and control music flow by the touch of buttons and proximity to body.
Inspirations
Sketch
Material/Tools Needed
- Base Jacket
- Accelerometers / Infrared Sensors / Sonars (for position detecting)
- Arduino Board
- Thread
- Machine Needles
- Battery
Skills/Concept to Master
- Coding in Arduino
- Connecting with MIDI
- Making sensors work
- Mounting sensors
- Data transmit through Bluetooth
Timeline
Milestone 1 (March 25)
- Try out different types of position detectors
- Determine which type of position detectors to finally use
Milestone 2 (April 8)
- Get the base jacket
- Mount sensors on the jacket
- Data transmit through Bluetooth
- Connect with MIDI
- Improve overall precision
Milestone 3 (April 22)
- Improve overall precision
- Aesthetic adjustments
Fallback Plan
We are planning to implement a jacket that allows wearers to control different parameters of music (i.e. pitch, amplitude or duration). If later in this semester we could determine that we have fallen behind what we have expected, we could: 1) Instead of having both arms to work, just implement and make sure one arm to work, and decrease the number of parameters of music we are going to control, or 2) Instead of making a Theremin Jacket, just simply make a position detector for parts of a body.