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}
}