Developed over the course Physical Computing of 3 weeks, the Musical Glove is a tool which Michie Cao and I hope will give musicians greater control over their performances and real-time experimentations.
We built the project based on Lilypad Arduino, a sewable Arduino microcontroller designed for building soft interactive textiles, and utilized diverse programmable electronic sensors. With 3 flex sensors sewn onto the fingers, the glove can affect the quality of ranges in music, such as volume and pitch, through simple finger bends. Using a contact switch and accelerometer, it can also play notes and effects when the index and thumb fingers are pressed together and when the wrist is rotated to the left and right.
The Musical Glove with a MIDI USB cable
For circuit board, we used the Arduino Lilypad, which is designed for wearables.
The gloves we used came with "touch pods" that work with a mobile screen. We modified them into contact switches using conductive thread.
Bending the index, middle or ring finger will affect change in the music quality.
The entire setup.
The glove interact with Ableton
One of the most challenging parts was transitioning from circuit to glove. We had to control test each part one by one.
Initial sketch of our wiring
