Touch Drum

My motivation for this project was to combine an acoustic cajon with electronic equiptment to increase the capabilities of the instrument. I added capacitive sensors hooked up to an Arduino and tactile transducers as pickups along with 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.