Music & Tech II Blog

 Below are three articles which relate to the ideas I have for this class. 1. Evaluating the WiiMote as a Musical Controller http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.bbp2372.2008.092 This paper contains the results of a small investigative study into the applications and intuitiveness of the Wii Remote's motion controls when applied to a music-creation context. They were drawn to this controller because of its unique motion control system, which is not as direct to map to a digital instrument in the same way keyboard or controller buttons are. They used a mixture of neural networks to allow the system to identify specific gestures from the controller's acceleration data, which is inherantly noisey and imprecise. The users had a wide degree of experience both on a musicianship scale as well as game-experience. They found that for discrete tasks such as playing a drum to a beat or indicating a scale, the Wii Remote was imprecise and lacked feedback to the user necessary to allow for those ...

 There are two concepts I'm interested in exploring for this class, one forcused on utilizing game controllers to generate a soundscape and the other based on creating a personalized program for arranging or composing music online. 1.  I love systems that repurpose existing controls or input devices for new purposes. One type that especially sticks out is game controllers. The concept of using an old X-Box or Playstation controller, or even potentially a motion-controlled device like a Wii Remote, to create a composition is really intriguing to me.  Currently, I'd be interested in writing a program in a language such as Chuck or Max which is mathematically driven, with a variety of initial inputs which dictate aspects of the overall tone of the sounds created. An example of this would be a input that specifies a range of values that tones could be generated from, so one run of the program could be constrained to a lower octave, while another might be in a higher octave. F...