The embroidered musical ball

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the Embroidered Musical Ball, a soft, tactile computer/MIDI musical instrument, that lets untrained children, novices and/or professionals perform and manipulate expressive and detailed music with simple everyday physical hand gestures such as squeezing and stretching. Our new embroidered pressure sensors replace the hard, bulky and awkward continuous control sensors common in most computer instruments, i.e., sliders, knobs and buttons. The combination of this light and easily physically manipulated instrument with a new, immersive approach to musical software allows players to expressively explore music with an immediacy not experienced in traditional instruments, which emphasize years of training to learn the precise control of pitches, timing, levels and various expression instructions. Instead, the musical ball lets players manipulate and explore a complete musical composition that has been mapped to different embroidered sensors. This allows players to immediately squeeze and mold the ball to perform the pre-composed music in an expressive manner. KeywordsMusical instruments, wearable computing, physical interface design, pressure sensors, industrial design © Copyright on this material is h e l d b y the author(s).

Cords and Chords: Exploring the Role of E-Textiles in Computational Audio

“…Their MIDI Jacket was a denim jacket with touch-sensitive embroidery which controlled an embedded MIDI sythesizer (Post et al, 2000). Other projects worked with similar technology, integrating multiple pressure sensors into squeezable balls designed for musical performance (Weinberg et al, 2000). For a first person account of the developments at the time, see Orth's closing chapter in (Buechley et al, 2013) about the work and challenges of this era.…”

“…The three technologies described above can each provide a single, constrained channel of information about the physical state of an interface, but each have the ability to provide richer information when the number of sensors is greatly increased. The early research project Musical Balls (Weinberg et al, 2000) contained eight capacitive pressure sensors explicitly so that the channels could be manipulated concurrently and continously through single gestures.…”

“…The earliest such example, a fabric keyboard, was descried by its creators as "satisfying to make music by crushing and crumpling" (Post et al, 2000). The Embroidered Musical Ball (Weinberg et al, 2000) from the same research lab had eight continuous pressure sensors mapped to musical parameters which were manipulated through squeezing the object and this tactility of audio parameters was also used in the felt sensors by Grant (2012). Topley (Bowers et al, 2016) scaled up the Embroidered Musical Ball project to create an 80cm diameter knit sphere named "ball."…”

Skweezee for Processing

“…Due to the expressive nature [2] and "nuanced control" [4], we also find numerous creative tools implementing squeeze interaction. Examples include musical instruments [9,11] and sculpting tools [4,7]. Stienstra & Marti also demonstrate the richness of squeeze interaction by addressing the affective component of squeezes to call a robot [8].…”

Design of a wearable pain management system with embroidered TENS electrodes

“…Embroidered sensors such as strain sensors (Vena et al , 2013), pressure sensors (Weinberg et al, 2000), temperature sensors (Elsner, 2010 ) humidity sensors (Pereira et al , 2011) have been studied in the literature. Embroidered electrodes which register electric potential generated by muscles, electric activity of neurons of the brain or the heart have been studied.…”