Description
With a simple gesture detection system, powered by a tiny mirror, you can turn your mobile phone in a small and handy digital ‘air guitar’. Since nowadays smartphones a very diffused and popular, by simply downloading an ‘app’ a person can access to a variety of functionalities and activities such as music making.
One one the most interesting possibilities regarding our ‘air guitar’ is the possibility for people to play together and create ensembles and groups. And why not, even composing for them. Playing on the streets, on the trains…and maybe creating a new “Symphony for 100 guitars”, similar to the one that Glenn Branca wrote years ago.
It was developed between April and May 2012 in collaboration with Peter Ezesz.
The prototype was developed in Processing (for Android) and libPd.
Mirror
How to play
Later on, I developed a different sensing system: it uses a pair of IR sensors (together with an IR emitter) to detect up-down and down-up movements. The signal is processed inside an Attiny45 microcontroller which translates the final signal into PWM. This signal is then sent to the Android app using the audio input of the smartphone.
