Musical grid interfaces such as the monome grid have developed into standard interfaces for musical equipment over the last 15 years. However, the types of possible interactions more or less remained the same, only expanding grid capabilities by external IO elements. Therefore, we propose to transfer capacitive touch technology to grid devices to expand their input capabilities by combining tangible and capacitive-touch based interaction paradigms. This enables to keep the generic nature of grid interfaces which is a key feature for many users. In this paper we present the TouchGrid concept and share our proof-of-concept implementation as well as an expert evaluation regarding the general concept of touch interaction used on grid devices. TouchGrid provides swipe and bezel interaction derived from smart phone interfaces to allow navigation between applications and access to menu systems in a familiar way.
You can find a project video on vimeo.
The project was published at NIME'21:
Beat Rossmy,Sebastian Unger, and Alexander Wiethoff. 2021. TouchGrid – Combining Touch Interaction with Musical Grid Interfaces. In NIME 2021. DOI:https://doi.org/10.21428/92fbeb44.303223db