What?

The Schleikess ("suspenders" in Yiddish) are my final project to the Interactive Digital Multimedia Techniques (ECS742P) module. My conference paper for the Research Methods (ECS719P) module is based on the same project. Both were developed in the Media and Arts Technology program, Queen Mary University of London.

The concept

A controller for full-body interactive performances that requires applying force and effort to play with, hopefully facilitating expressiveness. It is composed of two elastic bands that are attached to the players' belt loops, and a main unit that measures the tension on each elastic band. The player holds the other side of each elastic band and stretches them to play. The controller is demonstrated using a generative drum machine by mapping the stretch of the bands to tempo and the pitch of the samples.

System design

For more technical info see the full report submitted as part of the final IDMT project.

How to run it?

1. Connect the two load cells to the arduino using one SparkFun HX711 load cell amplifier.

2. Upload the scale_reader sketch to the arduino.

3. When the arduino is connected to the computer run the serial_to_osc python script with:

cd serial_to_osc
virtualenv env  # using virtualenv is highly  recommended. First run only
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt  # First run only
./serial_to_osc.py

1. Open the player/player.pd patch.

2. Profit!