What can you do with a PVC pipe, a USB keyboard and basic execution software? Brazilian artist Jerônimo Barbosa, also known as Jeraman, created a touch-responsive sketch-based musical instrument. And while it may not rank among the weirdest musical instruments we’ve seen of late, it’s certainly among the most inventive.Illusio allows the user to create music using digital loops that can be recorded and programmed live using pedals and a standard computer keyboard. But what’s most interesting about the project is the multi-touch sketch-based interface it uses to visually depict, arrange and manipulate the loops. The performance tool is based on interaction between sound and design and creates a very intuitive, tactile interface for digital music creation.Jeraman tells us more about it: “The image of a child who scribbles on a blank sheet of paper, in a mixture of dream, reality, images, and sounds, or the lonely musician who jams for real along with ‘ghost musicians,’ the static design that comes to life, the (techno)magic behind a touch pad… As the project was taking shape, I realized that all of its features, somehow, were related to illusions.”The design is surprisingly basic: hardware consists of a pedal and a table. The pedal was made from a standard USB keyboard and the table, whose structure was built with PVC, is based on a technique called Frustrated Total Internal Reflection, or FTIR—a theory that focuses on sound waves, reflection, refraction, and energy conservation.Below you can see the artist's first performance, demonstrating how the instrument can be used. He warns that he's not a professional musician, so this is only a test, but his noodling sounds pretty impressive to our untrained ears nonetheless.Developed in Processing and OpenFrameworks, the project is entirely open source and Jeraman has made all the code, as well as the blueprint of the instrument’s interface, available on his Github page and blog.
Advertisement