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10/7 - 10/13

A project log for Bot-thoven: A Robot Musician

Designing a Servo Motor Based Mallet System to Generate Musical Expression in Instrument Playing Robots

jason-pJason P. 10/17/2019 at 13:500 Comments

Plan

This week, I need to find outside sources of support on my project. In addition, I need to meet with David for our monthly check-up since it is now October.

Procedures

I looked into possible outside sources of support by finding other researchers working in the field of improving expressivity of instrument playing robots. I also met with David during 8th Period on Wednesday to check on his progress with mine. 

Progress

I found NIME - an International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. This annual conference gathers researchers from all around the world to share their work on new musical interface. The website contains hundreds of publications which have been published at the NIME conference, providing with numerous possible sources of contact. One possible source of contact I found is Steven Kemper - the Associate Professor of Music Technology and Composition at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

When meeting with David, we were able to take his code (which reads in a MIDI file and creates an output file for the Arduino interface to read) and have LEDs play the tune of Yankee Doodle and Hot Cross Buns. 

Videos can be found here:

Problems

Once my materials (xylophone, mallets, and servos) arrive, I will need to create a prototype of the servo-mallet system and test it on a xylophone key to see if the design is stable.

Discussions