- Inputs: 1. Pin touch; 2. Shake.
- Outputs: 1. Sound; 2. Lights.
- The right 4 buttons play 7 keys (from C to B) in different permutations (tone D, F, A are played by buttons working in pairs).
- The left 2 buttons are used to increase/decrease the 7 keys from middle to high/low.
- Lights on the micro-controller would be set to colors corresponding with low, middle or high tones.
- If it is shaken, a piece of music would be played, and user could pretend the music is played by him or her.
Project Post #1: Theremin Jacket
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.
Project Pitch – Yudong Huang
Synchronization Suit
For the final project, I would like to make a synchronization suit that could assist people with needs of learning poses and moves. In general, it provides wearers with feedback of what part of body to move and where to move. Therefore, it could be helpful especially for performers needing to synchronize their moves.
A good example of how synchronization suit could be useful is learning a dance. As a dancer, I have been leading practices and teaching a dance routine for times, and it really takes me a lot of energy and time. If we could have a wearable tech that provides everyone in a team with feedback of how to move their body in ream time, it could improve whole team’s efficiency and save a lot of time. The idea was first inspired by the yoga learning helper mentioned in class discussion.
Functions
Following are tow main function modes of the suit I could imagine so far.
Real Time Feedback – Each sync suit could be set as a teacher or a learner. When set as learner, it receives signals from a suit set as teacher, and tells the wearer whether his or her moves is synchronized with the teacher. This mode should work when there are more than one suits.
Pre-Record Moves – When working alone, the suit allows the wearer to record a sequence of moves (ex. a dance, a fitness move-pattern) which could be later used to compare with moves of another wearer (either send to another suit or give the suit to another wearer). At the end of comparing, the suit would tell a sync rate to the user as result.
Implementation
Here are some choices I would have to make or difficulties I would face with making the suit.
How to collect data of teacher’s moves? – I think sensors that could collect information of position change would be very helpful in this case. To as clear as much draw the moves of teacher’s whole body, sensors would be placed at each key joint of human body (ex. wrist, elbow, shoulder, chest, crotch, knee).
Feedback should be provided in what ways? – As the wearer could potentially teach / learn numbers of poses and moves, the way of giving feedback should be simple enough and feedback should be easy enough to get no matter in what poses. So far the idea I have come up with is that there would be lighting lines along the side of arms and legs to work as the real time feedback giver. Whether the part of body is in the correct position would be shown in binary colors (ex. green for yes and red for no), and because the lighting lines are along the side of whole body, they already cover the largest space they could cover, which might be easy enough to see.
In what ways to tell wearer the position to move? – This would probably be the hardest part of making the suit. Should the guiding be told visually, or guiding should be transmitted physically through a light force on body? This is an important choice and should be considered and discussed further.
Other Thoughts
As colors are displayed based on whether moves are synchronized, this might be made use of in performing and creating a different visual experience.
Maybe choreographs or move patterns could be designed and edited in software and imported into the suit in the future.