Aftertouch MIDI Glove

It’s been a while since I posted a new project here, but after the Moving Silence festival I got so fascinated, inspired and charged with this creative energy that shortly after I just knew exactly what I was going to do.

At first it occurred to me that so far I’ve been working on mostly controllers but not something as expressive as an instrument on its own. I really got inspired by Shingo Inao and Onyx Ashanti and their devices. I wanted to use my body and movement to produce or effect the sounds, but still be able to use that hand for my usual controllerism routine. That’s when the glove idea came in.

Effects would be triggered by pressing buttons on the glove and tilting it, this way the user is able to precisely control which effect he wants to trigger. Also I wanted to somehow trigger samples from it, by making a big sudden move with my hand. I also light feedback with colors and intensity that would be directly related to the intensity of the effects would be great. I believe that its very important when the audience can relate visual elements, big movements, lighting and color to what they are hearing.

So I began working on this idea by taking apart my old useless controller, I needed the accelerometer and IR proximity sensor inside. It took literally just a few hours to put everything together and start working on the code. I graphed all the values from the sensors and tried to find what kind of data and movements would make more sense for this project. Also I had to smooth out all the readings to get rid of the sudden irregular movements. I ended up using the rate of change looking for sudden accelerations for triggering samples, and constraining some values that would be used for tilt tracking.

The buttons are a bit small and uncomfortable to press all the time, so I’ve put a small piece of cardboard underneath the board to lift it higher, also sew in square pieces of cardboard over the push witches, though they slide out of the way and require readjustment. Still have to work on improving this. If you have any ideas pleas let me know in the comments 🙂

I highly believe that such technology should be free and the only way forward is to collectively contribute in its development and innovation. So you are highly encouraged, almost expected, to re use this code, improve it, and share it 🙂

As I mentioned above, building it is fairly easy and cheap. Here are all the parts I used.

1 x pair of cycling gloves €10(?)
1 x Teensy 3 €15
1 x ADXL335 Accelerometer €20
1 x Infrared Proximity Sensor €12
4 x Mini Push Buttons €1.20
1 x Common Anode RGB LED €1.5
3 x Resistors €0.60
+ bunch of Wires

Very roughly all the parts for this cost around 60 euros.

This is the diagram of how I wired everything up (note that I used a Teensy 3 microcontroller and the pins are a bit different)

And you can find all the source code here: github

15 thoughts on “Aftertouch MIDI Glove

  1. Wow, I am so interested in your design! As a student major in electrical engineer I’m also thinking about making such a product so when I try to do some research online I find your products. May I know which program do you use for playing the music?

  2. Incredible work, I am looking to create a similar device, and I was wondering if I could use the Makey Makey arduino board for this. It only has 6 analog input ports and the other 12 are digital. Is it possible to use the digital ones as well, or should a purchase another arduino board?

  3. Hi there, nice work inspired from what you have created, I am trying to create what you have achieved but having trouble wiring up the teensy board from your schematic view, are you able to tell me which pins need to go where? exactly please. Thanks.

  4. if you could end this, make important soft programming crazy values I feel you making more money with this than most of them can imagine… i’m one of these that really want to buy such a controller.
    with all due respect
    make it for the people and electronic scene
    Olejnik_Andrzej

Leave a Reply to naught101 Cancel reply