Electronic Instrument
A while back I found something online about the Gametrak, a 3D positioning device meant for playing virtual golf or other games. It contains two units with a spool of "fishing line". The retraction length of the spool is measured by a potentiometer and the angle of the line is measured by a kind of joystick at the top. Thus it can measure the position of the tip of the line in 3D space.
I have seen people use it as a midi controller which looked quite fun to play. I thought it would be cool to bring it into a more unique shape than the original Gametrak case and also make it more transportable, as the original case is quite heavy. This could also be an advantage over traditional instruments, the Gametrak based instrument could be very small since the fishing line retracts into the instrument when not in use in contrast to for example the strings of a guitar.
My idea was then to build a kind of electronic violin using two Gametrak units, one controlling the pitch (like the strings of the violin) and one controling the amplitude (like the bow).
This is my current prototype of the instrument. It is quite uncomfortable holding it like a violin though, so I am placing the instrument in my lap instead. It's more like playing a cello maybe.
I used SuperCollider to generate some sound with it. The Arduino sends the values from the Gametrak units and the pressure sensor over serial to SuperCollider. SC contains a physical model of bowed strings. I tried that first. What is cool about it is that it has a few input values like bow force, bow velocity, bow angle that I could map to the values from the Arduino so that it behaves like an actual string (or I think it does, I have never played a stringed instrument). Like an actual stringed instrument it is however also pretty hard to play and sounds quite horrible when I play it (the higher frequencies are ok, but not exactly pleasant either).
So instead I created a more synthesizer like sound based on some SC code I found on the internet, basically a saw wave and some filters. I let the pressure sensor control a low pass filter. The amplitude is controlled by the velocity of the line end in space so that you have kind of an infinite bow. Like this it is quite fun to play around with.
Since I am quite bad at hitting a specific note I also tried controlling the pitch using a MIDI keyboard. That works quite well. Since I want the final version to work indepenent of a PC and MIDI keyboard I will maybe implement a feature to quantize the frequency to a selected scale.
As a next step I want to bring everything into a nicer looking shape. To get it to be more comfortable to use like a violin I built the shape from PU foam. I made a big pile of foam an cut away from it until it was comfortable between my head and my shoulder.
Afterwards I took a bunch of pictures of the foam model and made it into a digital mesh using RealityCapture.
Around this mesh I could then build a model in Blender. I wanted it to have a bit of a futuristic look so I made this shape using a very simple mesh and a few modifiers. My plan is to then 3D print this with translucent filament.
When that is done I also want to put the sound generation into the instrument. I am hoping it would not be too much trouble to rewrite the SuperCollider code in C or Rust so I could put it on a microprocessor and into the instrument.