Ben’s Final Project Proposal draft for Network Music class:

I propose a musical instrument composed of multiple additive synthesizers interacting with a live granulation platform, the visualizer, and a cellphone as a controller with gyroscopes and accelerometers.

The goal of the instrument is obtaining a harmonious and aesthetic musical result with an intuitive interface using cellphone. The development of smartphones equipped with various sensors made the cellphone as the most comfortable and ubiquitous controller that every people have. Meanwhile, even though smartphone has become an essential part of our life, it is true that development of new mobile gesture-based musical instrument is not correspondingly active. Considering the situation, I suggest an intuitive musical instrument which does not require a high level of musical knowledge or instrumental performance experience. At the same time, the instrument is connected with different platforms through the network so that it can be used to obtain even more sophisticated musical results.

The proposed instrument is composed of 17 different additive synthesizers and each additive synthesizer is comprised of 17 sine wave oscillators. Each synthesizer is mapped with the corresponding granulator proposed by Rodney and the visualizer proposed by Mengyu.
According to the grain rate, volume, and the previous position of the granulation, the information is visualized through Mengyu’s system. Through this procedure, the position, distance, brightness, size, and color of 17 objects are determined. In this instrument, the features of the proposed oscillators are determined corresponding to the values. After then, the activation of each oscillator is determined according to the gravity and acceleration data received from the cellphone. Throughout the procedure, the instrument utilizes various information from different platforms and, at the same time, obtains the intuitive control on the timbre, length, amplitude of the synthesis.