Paper (Demo)

In the past few years, many technologies for motion capturing are used to examine posture and movements of musicians. Several video and sensor based systems are developed and available for these observations. In research and for augmented instruments one parameter is underrepresented so far. It is pressure and force applied by the musician while playing the musical instrument. In this paper we show a force-sensitive-resistor (FSR) based solution for position and force sensing between the contact point of the fingers and the musical instrument exemplarily built on a fingerboard of a violin and a load cell based approach built between the finger board and the neck of the violin. Main focus was an unobtrusive integration of the sensors into a traditional musical instrument. A Max51 based software tool allows the recording of the sensor data and real-time MIDI and OSC data transmission for easy integration into electronic music setups.