Air Organ

I was fortunate enough to have access to a MIDI enabled Casavant organ at our church. The organ is a fascinating instrument in many ways, but one particular is the fact that it was the first instrument where you can change the mapping between the input and output on the fly, and that is an otherwise exclusive feature of new digital musical instruments.

With the ever-improving Leap Motion SDK, and some work related motivation to "yarpify" things, I got the following running after struggling with some typos in my SYSEX messages that are used to control the organ.

The above shows one simple mapping: X (left right) controls the pitch, and moving the hand forward goes from no sound, to a single stop, to a second stop that's making notes a third higher. What was immediately interesting was that the digital control of the organ is extremely fast, and glissing through in this manner created runs that are basically impossible to do on a standard keyboard (well, maybe if you practiced some two-hand technique where you can time the black notes in between the white ones...). Also, it was very apparent that a simple linear X-position to pitch is highly unnatural when you don't have the tangible feedback of a physical, rectangular keyboard.

The Singing Notebook

As exploratory steps in controlling articulatory speech and singing synthesis (research topic), I hacked some sensors into an old notebook that fittingly contained some notes regarding the hardware I was using.

The book contains a bend and two pressure sensors hooked up to an Arduino Pro Mini interfaced to the laptop using a BlueSmirf serial to Bluetooth interface, and runs off a 1000mAh lipo cell. In the first mapping, the one pressure sensor controlled the lung parameter of the source model driving the synthesis, and the other one the blend between the tube shape for an I and AH vowel. Then, I change the mapping using a preset (on the laptop keyboard) which changes the target vowels used for the blending. Finally, I open the book and show the bend sensor controlling the pitch.