Title: Conductor

Description: An interactive instrument where the left hand switches between instrument sounds and the right hand generates music through its gestures and motions.

Project Abstract: I want to create a virtual instrument which utilizes handpose to allow users to play different instruments (tentatively a beat and a synth for now). The number of fingers held up in the left hand will control what instrument is being played. The right hand will play the instrument, each instrument will have a different gesture correlated to it. For example, a drum would be controlled by opening and closing your hand to play a bass beat and a pinch to play a snare. The synth will be based on the position of the hand across the screen, where gesturing your hand faster will result in a louder synth. I would like to add other instruments to this as well, and would love ideas of other instruments that would work well.

There would also be visuals that the hands interact with, which changes with each instrument but I have to figure out a way to incorporate your hands into it so the user is still aware of what they are doing.

Inspiration Material: This is inspired by instruments such as the theremin and other interactive instruments I’ve seen. Last semester I worked on a project connecting the kinect camera to control instruments in Ableton so I’m wondering if it’s possible to do this with the webcam and HandPose.

Audience: This is made for anyone to play with, not necessarily musicians. Hopefully this instrument makes it easy for people to create music with synths.

Challenges: I anticipate the biggest challenge will be mapping the synths. I want to incorporate many controllable elements including pitch, volume, filter, and reverb so I’m hoping that it doesn’t present too much of a challenge to do all of the above.