Touch Drum

Project Motivation: Use electronic music to increase an acoustic instrument's capabilities.

I modified an acoustic cajon with capacitive sensors hooked up to an Arduino, tactile transducers as pickups, and Max/MSP. From those components I could amplify the signal from the pickup to have an Electro-Acoustic cajon, and adjust the pan and reverb of the picked-up signal while playing.

The capacitive sensors were mounted to the back of the tapa (playing surface of the drum) and were hooked up to the Arduino, which was hooked up to Max/MSP, which in turn was used to control the pan and reverb. Simply by adjusting hand positioning, one can control the reverb and pan of the electro-acoustic cajon.

Here is a video of it in action. Notice the stereo panning of the audio in relation to hand positioning. The media player is loading... Download Video

I expanded upon code by Paul Badger from the CapactiveSense example library, and also Arduino2MaxWDigOut by Daniel Jolliffe from the Maxuino Project. The code is loaded onto the Arduino and uses serial communication to talk to Max. A Max patch then handles the signal processing to add pan and reverb to the pickup signal, based on information from the Arduino/sensors about hand position on the drum.

For the Max patch, Arduino sketch, and demo video, see the following link: Zip File

by Christopher Maino