The Augmented Violin

Lead by Alfonso Perez and collaborating later with composer Edgar Barroso, this project aims at augmenting a violin, adapting the acoustic instrument to be able to exploit the new compositional and performantic paradigms being used in modern electroacustic music. The augmentation will be based on motion capture sensors, that will capture a large set of gestural features in real time that can be mapped to compositional parameters (e.g. event triggering, sound generation, sound transformations, spazialization, visualizations, etc).

The implementation of the system is expected to be the following. Regarding the measuring system, we will make use of a Polhemus motion capture system, based on electromagnetic fields. A real-time software will be developed based on the MAX/MSP platform. The main performantic parameters that will be measured are the 3D position and inclination of the violin and bow (and therefore their velocity and acceleration) and bowing control parameters such as the bowing pressure, position in contact with the string, velocity, acceleration, distance of the playing point to the string and bowing angles (tilt, skewness, inclination). Also perceptual parameters such as the pitch or timbre can be additionally extracted. These parameters will constitute the palette that the composer will use to map gestures to sound and video parameters.

Some example scenarios are proposed in the following in order to give a more clear idea. We can define a coordinate axis for the violin with one axis from the middle of the bridge to the scroll, another from the middle of the bridge following a parallel direction to the bridge plane and the third vector being normal to the others. The azimuth of this system could be used to control sound spazialization and the elevation to control filter parameters of the sound being heard. The position of the bow when playing could be used to perform timbre transformations (e.g. spectral filtering, addition of harmonics, addition of noise). A hit in the air with the bow could trigger a sound or any type of event. Specific trajectories (e.g. a circle drawn in the air) could be as well recognized and mapped.