MIDI BLadE a midi controller concept that was derived from the electronic sport of fencing, at once a musical instrument and a playful dueling game that resembles traditional sword fighting. It is a powerful interaction with a device to find fluent musical expression with no training whatsoever and can be used toward meaningful musical composition and choreography. Players require neither musical background nor swordplay experience to enjoy finding harmony through battle with the MIDI Blade.

This project uses guard-mounted Arduino nano IoT’s to translate accelerometer and gyroscope measurements of gestural input into MIDI commands sent through bluetooth into Max MSP where its musical logic and oscillators are defined.

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AR Promo VID

At last, I return. My illness last week may have broken my body, but it only served to embolden my spirit. I feel renewed, I feel recharged, I feel….electrified. I took no pleasure in showing up to class last week’s class unprepared, but nevertheless, I persisted. I’ve spent the last many days squaring up what I missed in addition to getting ahead of Week 3 assignments. (stay tuned for the next week’s blog installment for exciting musings on arduinos and breadboards!)

While I was unwell, I felt some distance from the “physical” component of the assignment, so I took refuge in the readings and carefully considered how the writing of Donald Norman informs the tone for the work in this course. Norman’s texts are beautifully crafted, and while I was singing his praises, a student at my worktable took notice— how his eyes illuminated when he made the comment “Don Norman is the godfather of UX.” So rooted in this very theoretical discourse into a field of practice that’s now dominant in the design of everyday everything, this notion struck me deeply.

I’ll keep certain principles from the Norman readings in mind as I wade out into the mists of P. Comp. I’m so impressed by his integration of deep-level design principles with the study of human behavioral sciences. He is a self-conscious writer, wary of his own cleverness as indulgence, recognizing that language itself is communication design. This guy gets it. Based on the example models of bad design, it couldn’t be more evident that this book needed to be written, especially WHEN it was written. Many of the outmoded technologies is question are primitive, and fairly hard to relate to from modern experience, but tracing these obsolete devices and systems is almost like a fossil record of human thought, and still resonates since design now is a response to design then. In this way, that text will always matter.

The first chapter of POET was an essential primer for diving into Emotional Design, which brought to light dimensions of psychology and design that I’d never even imagined, and how cognitive and affective functions modulate visceral, behavioral, and reflective responses. I live my life by so many of these principles, and now have new admiration as I identify the manifold graces of Apple’s design, and see clearly how their concepts of aesthetics and beauty have been so carefully considered.

Enjoying this reading as I have has been like having dessert before supper, and now that it’s out of the way, let’s get physical: I’ve pored through all the labs, videos, and readings about circuit building, multimeters, breadboards, and the lot of it. I studied hard for that self-graded quiz, and unfortunately for myself, I’m a pretty tough grader. I’m not going to say what I think my score might have been, but judging by the Quiz 1 answer key that were sent out to the class, I can safely say this wouldn’t have made it onto the fridge. These are difficult concepts, but I think they are making more sense to me in practice than on paper.

I BUILT A SWITCH!! I thought hard about how to create something clever for this, but in the end, I decided I had to play to my strengths… I was playing guitar when the idea dawned on me. Eureka. My strings are metal, the frets are metal, I think we can make a circuit happen here. So I clipped the power from a 9v battery to the 6th string of the ITP guitar, and then rigged another wire to the 6th fret of the fingerboard, which fed into an LED, and back out to ground. Voila.

Will post for week 3 soon… ‘til then.

After finally arriving at ITP, I now face a fundamental question: What is interactivity? When I think of the term outside of the realm of technology, I would define its essence as an exchange between two operators, whereby two independent entities mediate across the divide of self and other via the operations of communication. Would that presuppose that communication is the consequence of interaction? The Crawford chapters seem to emphasize the mechanics of spoken conversation as the holy trinity of interaction, 1. thinking 2. listening 3. speaking. Yes that’s SPOKEN conversation, because printed words on a page are a one way interaction. Beyond my lofty theoretical proposition for the meaning of interaction, I also tend to think of it in the language of broadcast media. The printed word is a one way broadcast, as well as a radio show, or a tv program. Twitter, however, seems like quite the opposite as a forum for the expression of ideas and speech to millions worldwide, a venue for infinite exchanges.

I was struck by Crawford’s breakdown of the difference between the interface and the interaction, characterizing the former as the instrument upon which two actors may exchange a series of inputs and outputs. I choose the word “instrument” carefully, and as a musician, I’ve developed an understanding of a musical instrument as an interface for non-verbal sound media production, however the instrument does not play the player. It is simply a medium for the sonic output. I’m excited to explore how sound can be transduced (transducted?) into electrical signal , and how developing a working knowledge of circuit building might inform the character of the interactions I go about in my design practice.