The T-Stick: Maintaining a 12 year-old Digital Musical Instrument

Alex Nieva, Johnty Wang, Joseph Malloch, and Marcelo Wanderley

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

This paper presents the work to maintain several copies of the digital musical instrument (DMI) called the T-Stick in the hopes of extending their useful lifetime. The T-Sticks were originally conceived in 2006 and 20 copies have been built over the last 12 years. While they all preserve the original design concept, their evolution resulted in variations in choice of microcontrollers, and sensors. We worked with eight copies of the second and fourth generation T-Sticks to overcome issues related to the aging of components, changes in external software, lack of documentation, and in general, the problem of technical maintenance.

Citation:

Alex Nieva, Johnty Wang, Joseph Malloch, and Marcelo Wanderley. 2018. The T-Stick: Maintaining a 12 year-old Digital Musical Instrument. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1302545

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Nieva2018,
 abstract = {This paper presents the work to maintain several copies of the digital musical instrument (DMI) called the T-Stick in the hopes of extending their useful lifetime.  The T-Sticks were originally conceived in 2006 and 20 copies have been built over the last 12 years. While they all preserve the original design concept, their evolution resulted in variations in choice  of  microcontrollers,  and  sensors. We  worked  with eight copies of the second and fourth generation T-Sticks to overcome issues related to the aging of components, changes in external software, lack of documentation, and in general, the problem of technical maintenance.},
 address = {Blacksburg, Virginia, USA},
 author = {Alex Nieva and Johnty Wang and Joseph Malloch and Marcelo Wanderley},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1302545},
 editor = {Luke Dahl, Douglas Bowman, Thomas Martin},
 isbn = {978-1-949373-99-8},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 pages = {198--199},
 publisher = {Virginia Tech},
 title = {The T-Stick: Maintaining a 12 year-old Digital Musical Instrument},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2018/nime2018_paper0042.pdf},
 year = {2018}
}