Embedded systems, sensors, signal processing, music
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Description du projet :
The goal of this project is to build a drum set without drums. The basic idea is to place sensors on
the drum sticks that measure the linear and angular acceleration. The information on the movements
of the drummer is transferred wirelessly to a computer, where it is interpreted in a musical way. The
output of this analysis are events in the MIDI protocol [2], which is an old – but widely adopted –
standard for interfacing musical instruments. The MIDI events can be fed into suitable audio software
– such as Ableton or Hydrogen [1] – in order to finally produce sound.
In this project, we will cover the whole chain of information processing: The participants will learn
how to program a small embedded system based on the Zephyr operating system [3], how to establish
a wireless connection with the sensor node via the Bluetooth low energy (BLE) protocol, and how to
analyse the received data in real time in order to generate MIDI events
Objectifs du projet :
The expected result of the project is a working prototype that successfully detects the gestures of the
drummer and produces the according sound. Beyond this minimum requirement, there is room for
additional functionality: Estimatinng the force (velocity) of the gestures, estimating the 3D pose in
order to play different drums with a single stick, adding a foot controller for the bass drum. . .
The embedded sensor node will be programmed in C. Good basics in C are therefore necessary.
The signal processing on the host PC can be realized in any suitable language, we propose a selection
of Python libraries that are known to work for the tasks at hand. The host PC is required to run a
GNU/Linux system. In order to fix the embedded development board on the drum sticks, some basic
3D modeling and fabrication might be necessary.
During the midpoint evaluation, we expect that the participants have acquired sufficient theoretical
knownledge and practical experience for each part of the signal chain, such that they will be able to
integrate the whole system in the second part of the project
