A Force Sensitive Multi-Touch Array Supporting Multiple 2-D Musical Control Structures

David Wessel, Rimas Avizienis, Adrian Freed, and Matthew Wright

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation with musical applications of force sensitive multi-touch arrays of touchpads. Each of the touchpads supports a three dimensional representation of musical material: two spatial dimensions plus a force measurement we typically use to control dynamics. We have developed two pad systems, one with 24 pads and a second with 2 arrays of 16 pads each. We emphasize the treatment of gestures as sub-sampled audio signals. This tight coupling of gesture with audio provides for a high degree of control intimacy. Our experiments with the pad arrays demonstrate that we can efficiently deal with large numbers of audio encoded gesture channels – 72 for the 24 pad array and 96 for the two 16 pad arrays.

Citation

David Wessel, Rimas Avizienis, Adrian Freed, and Matthew Wright. 2007. A Force Sensitive Multi-Touch Array Supporting Multiple 2-D Musical Control Structures. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1179479

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{Wessel2007,
 abstract = {We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation with musical applications of force sensitive multi-touch arrays of touchpads. Each of the touchpads supports a three dimensional representation of musical material: two spatial dimensions plus a force measurement we typically use to control dynamics. We have developed two pad systems, one with 24 pads and a second with 2 arrays of 16 pads each. We emphasize the treatment of gestures as sub-sampled audio signals. This tight coupling of gesture with audio provides for a high degree of control intimacy. Our experiments with the pad arrays demonstrate that we can efficiently deal with large numbers of audio encoded gesture channels – 72 for the 24 pad array and 96 for the two 16 pad arrays.},
 address = {New York City, NY, United States},
 author = {Wessel, David and Avizienis, Rimas and Freed, Adrian and Wright, Matthew},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1179479},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 keywords = {Pressure and force sensing, High-resolution gestural signals, Touchpad, VersaPad.},
 pages = {41--45},
 title = {A Force Sensitive Multi-Touch Array Supporting Multiple {2-D} Musical Control Structures},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2007/nime2007_041.pdf},
 year = {2007}
}