Anglerfish

For Steve: Teach Kids Frank Lessons About Anatomy With This Inside-Out Anglerfish

Squeezing things

I made a resistive yarn ball that gives more resistance when you squeeze it from the "How to Get What You Want" guide (sounds suspiciously like a self-help book) found at kobakant.at. It is a very approachable guide on how to make variable resistors and switches with textiles. Tomorrow I'm going to attempt to wrap another conductive ball with an accelerometer inside as control for an experimental instrument I am attempting to make musical, the interface being based around squeezing and turning this conductive ball.

 In addition, I finally looked into the outcomes of the Guthman competition and there is a video of a very similar interface for an instrument called "

ELEKTRISK ORANSJE"

(homage to the Sonic Banana?)

of which some entertaining video documentation can be found here

I once found this postcard from Poland with a really strange looking hotdog on it

More on this later,

isaac

Better contact mics

As you may already know, my metal plate project will be utilizing a couple of contact mics for amplification and controlled feedback.
One of the downsides to the cheap piezo transducers is that, for electrical and mechanical reasons that I don't totally understand, a DIY contact mic without a preamp has a resonant peak in the response and can't reproduce low end well.
To that end, I am going into the workbench this afternoon to make a couple of preamps using this design:
http://www.zachpoff.com/diy-resources/alex-rice-piezo-preamplifier/

Guitar Wing

Even though we're intentionally avoiding augmented instruments with our first project, I wanted to share these videos I found of the Guitar Wing since augmented electric guitar and the use of electric guitar in new music is something that interests me a great deal.

That being said, the results in these videos are pretty cheesy, and I would say that they don't so much extend the abilities of the guitar as they simply put buttons and sliders in easy ergonomic reach for the guitarist.

Still, I think it's a step in the right direction, or at least a good sideways step.

I expect people that use the Guitar Wing will end up playing finger style (forgo a pick) a lot more than they used to.

The Robocaster was actually an early prototype made (I think) by Moldover that inspired the Guitar Wing:

This is Moldover using the finished production model- the most important point to note is that it can be added to an existing guitar without modification:

Digital Panel Joinery

For those laser cutting cases and boxes, check out this post on digital panel joinery. Lots of design ideas. http://makezine.com/2012/04/13/cnc-panel-joinery-notebook/

Just came across this, dont know how many have seen it. Think it might be of interest to some... [=

Future Self by rAndom International

Guthman Musical Instrument Competition

Every year, Georgia Tech. School of Music holds a competition on new musical instrument. Here's the list of semifanlists this year.

Hope we can see some projects from this class next year.

See hear for more details : http://guthman.gatech.edu/2014-semi-finalists

Name	Instrument	Country
Daniel Novy	BubbleSynth	USA
Chester Udell	eMersion	USA
nu desine	AlphaSphere	UK
Yuto Hasebe	Tree Guitar	Japan
Teenage Engineering	OP-1	Sweden
Tolgahan Cogulu	Adjustable Microtonal Guitar	Turkey
Francesca Fini	BLIND	Italy
Stegano Fasciani	Voice Controlled Interface	Singapore
Berendan McCloskey	inGrid	Ireland
Margariet van Eekelen	Splashbox	Netherlands
Edward Ptokar	Extracted Synthesizers	USA
John Driscoll	Speaking in Tongues	USA
Uday Shankar	Chitravenu	India
Amit Shoham	Trum	USA
Yoshihito Nakanishi	Powder Box	Japan
Ian Hattwick	The Spine	Canada
Mailis Rodriques	Intonaspacio	Portugal
Michael Shonle	eCorder	USA
Dentaku	Ototo	UK
panGenerator	Elektrisk Oransje	Poland
Feng Gao	TRI-O	USA

1DOF Haptic Devices

Those interested in haptics may want to check out http://eduhaptics.org/, which has a section devoted to 1 degree-of-freedom "Haptic Paddles:" http://eduhaptics.org/index.php/HapticDevices/HapticPaddles.

Furthermore, check out the "Hapkit:" http://hapkit.stanford.edu/.

Ceramic

Came across this while researching "amplified ceramic".



Not necessarily 100% relevant, but I thought it was lovely and worth sharing!
I guess technically it could be interactive if the spectators were willing to get wet.

Paper on Textile Sensors

Some techniques and technologies for sensing with textiles, with a good bibliography:

http://web.media.mit.edu/~plusea/downloads/papers/UIST-SensorLibrarySubmitted.pdf