TedStick: A Tangible Electrophonic Drumstick

Cory Levinson

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

TedStick is a new wireless musical instrument that processes acoustic sounds resonating within its wooden body and ma-nipulates them via gestural movements. The sounds are transduced by a piezoelectric sensor inside the wooden body, so any tactile contact with TedStick is transmitted as audio and further processed by a computer. The main method for performing with TedStick focuses on extracting diverse sounds from within the resonant properties of TedStick it-self. This is done by holding TedStick in one hand and a standard drumstick in the opposite hand while tapping, rubbing, or scraping the two against each other. Gestural movements of TedStick are then mapped to parameters for several sound effects including pitch shift, delay, reverb and low/high pass filters. Using this technique the hand holding the drumstick can control the acoustic sounds/interaction between the sticks while the hand holding TedStick can fo-cus purely on controlling the sound manipulation and effects parameters.

Citation:

Cory Levinson. 2012. TedStick: A Tangible Electrophonic Drumstick. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1178325

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Levinson2012,
 abstract = {TedStick is a new wireless musical instrument that processes acoustic sounds resonating within its wooden body and ma-nipulates them via gestural movements. The sounds are transduced by a piezoelectric sensor inside the wooden body, so any tactile contact with TedStick is transmitted as audio and further processed by a computer. The main method for performing with TedStick focuses on extracting diverse sounds from within the resonant properties of TedStick it-self. This is done by holding TedStick in one hand and a standard drumstick in the opposite hand while tapping, rubbing, or scraping the two against each other. Gestural movements of TedStick are then mapped to parameters for several sound effects including pitch shift, delay, reverb and low/high pass filters. Using this technique the hand holding the drumstick can control the acoustic sounds/interaction between the sticks while the hand holding TedStick can fo-cus purely on controlling the sound manipulation and effects parameters.},
 address = {Ann Arbor, Michigan},
 author = {Cory Levinson},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1178325},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 keywords = {tangible user interface, piezoelectric sensors, gestural per-formance, digital sound manipulation},
 publisher = {University of Michigan},
 title = {TedStick: A Tangible Electrophonic Drumstick},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2012/nime2012_96.pdf},
 year = {2012}
}