Hardware hacking can be paradoxical in that those who practice the art often use older technology to create entirely novel effects.

Quite often the object being experimented upon is an obsolesced children’s toy. One of the most popular hacks is bending circuits on Speak & Spells to create distorted or pitch-shifted versions of the original output, and someone has even bent the circuits on a defenseless furby.

For musicians, the possibilities are exciting not only because new sounds are being generated, but because new ways of playing sound are being realised as well. Earlier this week I attended the inaugural Portland DorkBot gathering, where one such new path was demonstrated by software designer and DorkBot organizer Jason Plumb.

The device Plumb wore and played was called the Essential Reality P5 Glove, and is as Plumb describes “a glove controller that provides a human-computer interface in 11 dimensions (x, y, z, roll, pitch, yaw, and 5 individual finger bends).”

Click the image for a short video clip of Plumb demonstrating how the glove can be used to control audio, and read after the jump for a great interview with him as well.

And here is a link to the fellow I couldn’t remember at the time: http://www.crackle.org/TheHands.htm. His name is Michel Waisvisz.

Oh yeah…I’ve seen that for sure. What’s really cool about his stuff is that he’s all about a tactile human-body-as-controlled-feedback mechanism in a “musical” context. He designed the Cracklebox at STEIM in the 70s. In an odd bit of synchronicity, I built 3 crackleboxes based on his design earlier this year (and have been showing them off at the biweekly dorkbot gatherings, etc). My page for the crackleboxes I built is over here: http://noisybox.net/electronics/cracklebox/

What is the Essential Reality P5?

In short, the P5 glove is a glove controller that provides a human-computer interface in 11 dimensions (x, y, z, roll, pitch, yaw, and 5 individual finger bends). I believe that the company that produced them has tanked and the gloves have been out of production for several years. They can still be obtained sometimes for $40-50, but their increasing rarity is bumping the prices ever higher…

If I understood you correctly, you wrote your own software to interface between the glove and a computer? Can you describe that process?

Yeah, I stand on the shoulders of giants. I should have been more clear in that. I wanted to emphasize the free software community aspect of it all…but my contribution was to bridge from the usb driver to the pure-data environment.

For that bit, I had initially attempted to write an “external” (a plugin essentially) for pure-data. Due to some pretty lame constraints, that approach didn’t work well, so I wrote p5osc…an application that can send control signals from the P5 glove to other applications over a network connection. Once the gap was bridged, I worked on a small pd abstraction to further map the OSC data into simple pd messages.

How was sound being generated during your presentation?

All of the sound during the presentation was generated with pure-data. It’s a FOSS (free and open source software) data-flow language environment targeted at doing dsp/sound work. I love it…I can’t rant enough about it. The patches to control/generate the sound were all designed by me at the last minute specifically for the dorkbot event.

Can you explain the audio signal chain a little further after the computer including oscillators and ampflication, etc?

I demoed 4 patches, all were custom patches build in pure-data:

1) Dual 2-channel simple oscillator mixer. Two of the oscillator frequencies were controlled by Cartesian position, the other two were controlled by rotational orientation. Amplitudes (mix) between Cartesian and rotation were controlled by finger bend amounts.

2) Dual frequency modulated synthesizers. Cartesian position and rotation orientation controlled carrier frequency and modulation frequency, fingers controlled modulation index (amount).

3) Dual bandpass filters controlling center frequency and Q applied to white noise sources…again controlled by 2 Cartesian positions and 2 rotations. Also contained a random oscillator through delay lines running through a finger bend controlled bandpass filter.

4) Soundfont-based midi drum synthesis, trigger rate and midi channel were controlled by 2-d Cartesian position.

I think that I had pinky finger bend controlling overall amplitude for each, but it was a bit too uncontrollable for the setting and I ended controlling overall output volume manually.

During your presentation, you mentioned that your fingers weren’t very dextrous and that you hadn’t played with the glove very often to generate sound. Do you feel that the glove is well designed and that with enough time someone might be able to compose and reliably perform music with it?

The glove certainly has its limitations…but those same limitations give it a certain attraction. It’s like a quirky character flaw in a close friend. I think the same can be said of the software in its current state. Sure, with some effort, the glitch factors can [will?] be ironed out and the thing will be more robust…but it’s those very glitches that spark my interest.

The limitations in my “playing” ability were mostly caused by not having
learned the environment that I had rushed to create. When playing with
any [interactive] instrument, there’s a learning curve…and I just
hadn’t spent any time to become comfortable in it.

What are the possibilities for using the glove with a MIDI system?

Tons of possibilities exist for using the glove with MIDI, especially since I’ve done the legwork of getting pd to grok the p5 control signals…it’s really pretty trivial then to map into MIDI. Anything that then talks MIDI (be it hardware sequencers/synths/whatever or other software apps) can be fed position/gesture control generated by the P5 glove.

Anything you’d like to add?

The p5 glove controller is a fun and super cheap project (at least at
the time) that dorkbot has kinda forced me to revisit. I appreciate
being given the chance to talk about it, and I’m very excited to see the
Portland dorkbot community growing in its various forms!

If you have interest, I have my experimental sound/noise project over
here: http://infiltrationlab.com/

Hope to see you out at another dorkbot soon..formal or informal.

Best,

-jason
http://www.noisybox.net

Related Posts:

• Make Noise With Computer Chips
• Dorkbot 0×01 Event

Categories: interviews, music, technology, video
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