A Composer's Adventures @ ITP

My idea for an eventual final project involves recreating one of my favorite interfaces and using it to control various digital media, and that interface is – the accordion. Here are some photos of my (analog) accordion:

The concept is to build my own wooden accordion with a variety of sensors to capture the movement of the bellows, the movement of the whole instrument as well as a smaller set of keys on either end. The idea is to create a versatile media controller that could have many applications, but for a short-term application I will be writing a processing sketch that will take the accordion’s input to control digital audio and processing visuals. To explore the controller, this processing code will consist of three different modes of operation that will pair the audio and visual components in different ways. As there are different registers on an accordion (for different octaves and timbres) this application will use “reality registers” that change the interaction of the controller.

The first “reality register” will be the most literal digital representation of the accordion. It will consist of a human silhouette animated with colored gradient frames representing the movement of the accordions bellows, the audio will be an unprocessed recording of an accordion with the key mappings reflecting a traditional analog accordion. The code for the visual prototype for this mode is here: midtermI and frame.

The second “reality register” keeps the basic accordion interaction, but takes it to a slightly more abstract level, with the whole screen being taken up by the colored gradient frames which, again, reflect the motion of the bellows. In this mode the audio portion will be a more processed accordion recording much like the placeholder sample now being used for demo purposes. The code for the visual prototype for this mode is here: midtermII (and uses the same frame object as midterm part I).

The third and final “reality register” abstracts the accordion even farther with a serious of undulating discs representing the accordions bellows and audio samples of some instrument (or perhaps not a musical instrument at all) mapped onto the keys. The code for the visual prototype for this mode is here: midtermIII and disc.

If you want to test it out at home here is a link to a zip file with the audiovisual assets you’ll need to put in the data folder of the sketches: assets

*addition- here are links to the sketches in browser but NB you’ll need a pretty large display and their behavior has been a little buggy so far in some browsers: midtermI, midtermII, midtermIII