Near-Field Motion Capture • pMUT Ultrasound Array • Control Voltage
I found no thread for new member introductions. I am not even certain if this is the appropriate venue for sharing my work.
In attempting to get my hands on the code and access to the expertise needed to experiment and make practical use of MIDI 2.0 features, I ran into impenetrable walls of social and economic exclusivity, like workshops that effectively cost thousands provided you succeed in jumping through the right hoops to qualify. The presumption is that organizations like the MIDI Association are the offspring of capitalist meritocracy with no history of excluding people like myself by law and custom to this very day.
Anyway, after listening to Andrew Mee speak I reached out to him, who in turn referred me to Athan Billias, Chief Operating Officer/Executive Board, who referred me to this group and followed that recommendation with
“We are happy to open a dialog and discuss how to connect you with like-minded people in the MIDI Association community.”
About my work . . .
One of my current projects is a near-field motion capture system that anticipates the onset of a note with high confidence based on a networked array of pMUT or Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasound Transducers.
pMUTs can be fabricated at a sufficiently small size to allow the creation of an array on a rigid or flexible membrane. In this application, the dimensions are defined by a guitar fretboard, generating a live ultrasound image of the hand and finger geometry through non-mechanical beamforming/beam-steering not just lending immediate accuracy, but a prescient vision of the note(s) within a musical context, tracking the artist’s relationship with the instrument.
In addition to the hand position and finger geometry, this array will provide nuance of strings open and closed, hammer on-off, bending, scuffing, smearing, and various styles of left-hand vibrato that are at best only inferred by CV to MIDI controllers that reduce guitars to performative keytars with strings.
During the development of the machine-learned human musical universe (a database, a not metaphysical universe), a Stretchsense motion-capture glove would be used for the enhanced kinesthetics data of hand and finger geometry in one-to-one, correspondence with the neck’s upward view of the hand. Later controller refinements to include the capture of tapping, plectrum, and fingerpicking styles.
We populate a framework borrowed from finger signing transliteration technology, something I believe a wrong-headed idea for deaf people, but redeemable by its repurposing in this specific application for musical expression.
This is not a discrete device I propose but part of the laboriously researched 𝄞lımmeг or Glimmer • Music Change Management, simply put, an agnostic ecosystem of digital Music Stand, live-performance DAW, and FX Pedalboard reimagined from the perspective of environmental psychology, human factors.
Brief Bio
Starting out at age 8 playing a Sears Silvertone acoustic guitar, by age 10 I was playing various folk music Blues, Bluegrass, Labor song until having dinner with a classmate their older sister took us with her to hear a band at Cincinnati Xavier University’s Field House, where I saw and heard Jimi Hendrix before what I for him must have been a small crowd.
Within a year I had adopted an electric guitar and amp, and my fellow Black classmates who already hated my playing weird music, had one more excuse when I added electric rock to my repertoire, a style that I considered then and now a form of outsider folk music.
By 1971 I was playing private parties for adults and by age 16 had a fake ID so I could play with older drinking age kids in bars and rock clubs throughout Midwest America. I learned to repair and modify my guitars, pedals and amps, build a few guitars. Neither my musicianship nor my knowledge and skill earned me respect but actually seemed to make people angrier.
I eventually got a day job working in IT but never gave up my interests in science and the performing arts. I have been engaged in what I call ArtScience for over 45 years, attempting one strategy after another to accomplish something valuable without self-destructing.
The only thing worse than widespread intersectional racialized class barriers in the performing arts is the equally widespread indifference by people of privilege, punctuated by various forms of social triangulation, gaslighting, and economic and on occasion physical violence.