Final Project Ideas

3D Painting

Last year I created a program that generates a digital ‘painting’ from a photo. It would be interesting to create 3d sculptures out of these works (by translating the image into some arrangement of layers or a normal map). But I imagine it would be difficult to programmatically paint or color them, so I’m not sure the feasibility of this.

Musical Devices

These are ideas for musical devices based on some past work — They might be outside the scope of the class but since I am also in NIME, I might be working towards building something like this anyway.

Physical Spectrogram/Sampler

Mockup showing two hands touching a 3D spectrogram

This device would allow someone to explore sound through physical touch. The object is a three dimensional spectrogram made up of an array of pins, similar to a pin art toy. The pins are motorized and can take the form of any sound file used as an input, creating a ‘landscape’ representing the sound’s frequencies over time. Like a plasma ball, the user interacts with the surface by touching it — Capacitive sensors in the pins allow for touch detection across the surface.

Read full proposal/description

Abacusynth

The Abacusynth is a software synthesizer inspired loosely by an abacus — it would be fun to create a physical version where the user places/slides tokens on rods to create sound.

Geoboard Sequencer

Another plugin I am working on is a polygonal sequencer where the user draws polygons to generate melodies. I would love to have this in physical form. I imagine a geoboard that senses (somehow) the position of a rubber band and this is used to generate MIDI data.