Heart of the Arts

Presenting our final glove!
Audrey is soldering the circuitry for the gloves
Katherine vectorized the Tech Tower drawing
Graphing frequences
Prototyping the glove and working with aesthetics
Testing out the glove
Audi testing different electronics
Sabeen coding in Arduino
Katherine figuring out the music theory behind our multi-modal instrument idea.

Inspiration

Our group consists of all musicians who love tech, whether it be building things with Arduinos, creating rocket prototypes, or programming robots. We were excited to have the opportunity to create something outside of what we would normally encounter in our curriculum and all the resources available. Also, we wanted to make an instrument that is accessible (we all know how expensive they are and the difficulty curve.

What it does

It is a touch sensitive glove instrument we have developed for both hands, utilizing the tuning of the Kalimba, a friendly register for people to easily pick up and play. Additionally, we made a lasercut design of Tech Tower to be included with our piece, that is decorated with glowing LED lights, symbolizing that Tech would be a much brighter and more beautiful place if we intertwined arts and technology in our lives.

How we built it

Research & coding!
Lots of soldering!
Music theory! We used no libraries, we purely coded it by graphing the frequencies for each string.

Challenges we ran into

Many! Our original plan was to build a multimodal instrument along with our piece. We built two functional glove instruments, but we could not get them to work together considering the time constraint. This is mostly because we couldn't figure out the circuitry correctly until we realized that we had to use 10k resistors. But in the end, we compromised, and still reached our original, creative vision.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to implement all our skills together: music, visual arts, engineering, and computer science. We were super excited that it connected our hobbies with our current passion for technology. Also, our original vision was still prominent as we were able to make a glove that is accessible for anyone.

What we learned

We learned more about Arduino, Adafruit DotSpot, ultrasonic sensors, and music theory. With a majority of us never using Arduinos before, this was a perfect time to explore this new range of technology and we learnt that we could do A LOT with these tiny microcontrollers!

What's next for Heart of the Arts

We plan on figuring out how to wire the second hand Arduino instrument with the first. We also would like to make our Tech Tower display responsive to the melodies we make out of our glove instruments to integrate art and technology even further!

(P.S. check out our Mii music cover at the end of the video :D )