sKale :
A Gestural Interactive Instrument for Improvisation Based on Musical Scales and Glissando techniques
A Gestural Interactive Instrument for Improvisation Based on Musical Scales and Glissando techniques
Introduction
My work, sKale, is a tool/instrument for gestural interactive music performance including two parts (two ideas based on the same framework). The scope of the project is majorly focused on improvisation and performance. Also it was originally designed for semi- or non-musicians. The hardware tool employed was a game controller called GameTrak that was originally designed for golf games. The programming language used for building the whole mechanism is ChucK.
Part I
The first part of this project, is a gestural Guzheng-inspired virtual instrument based on Chinese pentatonic scales. Guzheng is a traditional Chinese instrument, which is a flat wood instrument with a number of strings built on it.
By using the GameTrak controller, the hand movements and positions can be detected and used for mapping to musical parameters (in this case, pitches arranged in a pentatonic scale). By swiping back and forth, a glissando-like musical result is produced.
Part II
After building this pentatonic scale based instrument in pt.I, I started to think that maybe I could also make some changes to the program so that I can improvise in a jazz framework, because in a jazz system, the term scale or mode is also fairly crucial.
Additionally, in this case, the gestures are slightly changed — instead of swiping in the Y-axis, which is the way you play Guzheng, for this part I referred to other types of instruments such as a vibraphones and a Marimba.
- Audio demo for part 2: here
- The entire codes of the project can be viewed on my Github.
My work, sKale, is a tool/instrument for gestural interactive music performance including two parts (two ideas based on the same framework). The scope of the project is majorly focused on improvisation and performance. Also it was originally designed for semi- or non-musicians. The hardware tool employed was a game controller called GameTrak that was originally designed for golf games. The programming language used for building the whole mechanism is ChucK.
Part I
The first part of this project, is a gestural Guzheng-inspired virtual instrument based on Chinese pentatonic scales. Guzheng is a traditional Chinese instrument, which is a flat wood instrument with a number of strings built on it.
By using the GameTrak controller, the hand movements and positions can be detected and used for mapping to musical parameters (in this case, pitches arranged in a pentatonic scale). By swiping back and forth, a glissando-like musical result is produced.
Part II
After building this pentatonic scale based instrument in pt.I, I started to think that maybe I could also make some changes to the program so that I can improvise in a jazz framework, because in a jazz system, the term scale or mode is also fairly crucial.
Additionally, in this case, the gestures are slightly changed — instead of swiping in the Y-axis, which is the way you play Guzheng, for this part I referred to other types of instruments such as a vibraphones and a Marimba.
- Audio demo for part 2: here
- The entire codes of the project can be viewed on my Github.