Project #06.4: HandSketch

The HandS­ketch is a dig­i­tal instru­ment made for the bi-manual con­trol of voice qual­ity dimen­sions: pitch, insten­sity, glot­tal flow para­me­ters. It is made of pur­shasable devices: a pen tablet and force sens­ing resis­tors (FSRs). More pre­cisely it is built around a WacomTM graphic tablet, played ver­ti­cally along the upper part of the body. The HandS­ketch uses a par­tic­u­lar polar trans­for­ma­tion of the con­trol space in order to fit the require­ments of ther pref­ered hand. A sens­ing strat­egy inspired by wood­wind and string instru­ments is adapted to FSRs for the use of the non-prefered hand. It is impor­tant to high­light that the instru­ment evolved in nine con­sec­u­tive ver­sions – being now called HS1.8 – and thus reached a more sta­ble shape and behav­ior.
The most recent play­ing sit­u­a­tion is illus­trated in Fig­ure 1.

In this paper we first pro­pose a dis­cus­sion on the pen-based con­trol of music (Sec­tion II). In the same Sec­tion we con­tinue by address­ing a serie of issues related to the improve­ment of pen-based ges­tures. In Sec­tion III we describe choices that have been made con­cern­ing the non-prefered hand. Finally a sig­nif­i­cant part of this chap­ter is devoted, in Sec­tion IV, to dis­cussing the long-term prac­tice of this instru­ment and its influ­ence on expres­siv­ity.
We also want to notice that the HandS­ketch project does not attempt to ”prove” any supe­ri­or­ity or rel­e­vance, com­pared to the wide instru­ment mak­ing com­mu­nity. As it has been shown in, the assess­ment of a musi­cal instru­ment remains an open proble. We can argue that a sys­tem­atic approach is used in order to define our con­trol strate­gies, but we can not totally pre­tend that this instru­ment does not rely on any idio­syn­cratic idea. The rel­e­vance of this instru­ment is rather jus­ti­fied by its abil­ity to achieve Analysis-by-Interaction.

Demos

Results

The project report is avail­able as well as its ref­er­ence entry.