Final Project: Digital Tabla – David Lu
Presentation:
The original plan was to collaborate with Jake in creating a composition of live electronic music, where Jake would control a monophonic instrument with lots of continuously varying modulation, and where I would provide percussion accompaniment that would be responsive to tempo changes, interruptions, and general groove.
However, we didn’t have time to figure something out, and I also couldn’t even get my instrument working, so I worked with what I had: LEDs that flashed when I struck the drums. Honestly, the LEDs were almost an afterthought, and more for helping me visualize the responsiveness of my instrument (it’s not as responsive as I would like it to be), and they were not meant to be the primary focus, but that was all I had 😐
So, in the few minutes before presentation, I decided to shut off the lights to glamorize the flashing lights.
Documentation:
Demo video:
Future plans:
I still haven’t gotten the code to send out MIDI messages. I will need to do that.
But the more important thing is to make the sensors more sensitive and the code more accurate. For that, I will have to redo the right hand drum to its original design, probably also adding a gratituous number of piezos in parallel as well.
Replacing the breadboard with a protoboard is also something I should consider.
