My good friend and colleague Avrum Hollinger created some amazing fMRI-compatible musical instruments while working in the Input Devices and Music Interaction Lab at McGill University. They recently released a video explaining parts of the project and featuring a few of his creations:
Hardware
Documentary preview: Instrumented Bodies
We recently posted a teaser video for our project “Instrumented Bodies: Digital Prostheses for Music and Dance Performance” — enjoy!
Teaser Photos from the Gestes Project
Here are a couple of teaser photos from the development of the “Spine” digital musical instrument for the Gestes Project. Design, development and construction by Joseph Malloch, Ian Hattwick, and Anthony Piciacchia.
Using multiple IMUs for sensing deformation
I made this video today to quickly document some work I’ve been doing using multiple inertial measurement units (IMUs) for tracking the orientation, bending, and twisting of deformable objects. Intertial measurement units generally contain 3-axis accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers – the data can be cleverly combined to obtain an estimate of orientation (as long as the IMU is being used in an environment with constant gravity and magnetic field, and not in free-fall).
This particular object has two Mongoose IMUs embedded inside it, running some custom firmware I wrote for complementary filtering/sensor fusion for estimation of orientation.
Joseph Malloch 