Tactile-harmony
Tools for a more intuitive understanding of harmony/dissonance in music (2013, RCA and ongoing music visualisation project)
What if the instruments we played allowed us to physically ‘feel’ harmony? Custom-made electromagnets under each key create dynamic areas of repulsion and attraction in response to the evolving harmonies of the music being played. A wearable finger attachment allows the player to get an immediate tactile sense of the musical dissonances and harmonies while they are playing; a musical force-field where the "right" notes attract, and the "wrong" notes repel.
[1] Java application coded in Processing, visually highlighting the direction/pull of chord progressions to augment the physical forces being felt by the player. Text files of the chords can be read into the software, which then looks for harmonic relationships and visualises these.
[2-5] An early mock-up using permanent magnets and a single scale, winding my own electro-magnets, the final experiment with individually controllable electromagnets underneath a capacitive keyboard.
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︎ See code here
Solo Project, Royal College of Art & Imperial College London 2013.