Alright, thesisupdate

I’ve decided to use this blog as my official thesisblog. Which means that on this blog I’ll keep you posted on how my expressive laptop-music-instrument is doing.

For those that don’t know yet, my thesis is about (see title) Performance Based Musicmaking. I created the subject because I noticed that music performers using laptops for generating their sound were usually ignoring the much larger possibilities of a laptop. Like the possibility of reading out one’s body movements and generating music from that. Which is exactly what I’m going to do.

My goal is creating a musical instrument controlled by 4 Wiimotes. The wiimotes are the remote-shaped controllers of the Nintendo Wii, and you can connect these very easily to your computer or laptop by bluetooth. In the controller there are a couple of movement sensors (accelerometers) and an infrared camera for tracking IR-leds. So the price of 35-40 euros is very cheap for what’s there to use.

So, 4 wiimotes, two for the arms, two for the legs. The bluetooth technology also makes them wireless, which enables the musician to move freely on stage while expressing themselves with movement. This is not only for them a more expressive experience, also the audience gets that extra visual information and feeling from the musician.

There’s plenty of software that you can control using these wiimotes, because they can send OSC and Midi signals, to control virtually any audio application out there. I’ve done some first experiments with the wiimotes and now I’m up to writing my own software in Pure Data or Processing to connect the wiimotes to another audio application.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 20:16 and is filed under Thesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.