The Irregular Incurve is a robotic instrument built by [Xiaoyang Feng] as part of his ITP thesis work. It’s a MIDI instrument with an array of 12 strung bows mounted to a curved shower rod. The end of each bow has a tuning key. The strings are each picked using independently mounted arms. One servo controls the downward motion of the pick while the other controls the rotation of the shaft. A damper is also attached to each arm. The string vibrations are transferred to a spruce soundbox under the bridge. Below you can see a video of Gizmodo playing with it at the ITP show. Check out [Xiaoyang]’s Flickr set for images of the build process plus some early videos of the mechanism.
[vimeo 4609104]
Neat instrument… but I would have liked to see an actual performance on it.
Concept is great, execution (at least going by video) is awful.
So except for the monkey pounding on the keyboard there’s no actual musical example?
Very clearly an attempt to implement a real world version of the picked string instruments from the Animusic 1 video “Acoustic Curves”. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoz82WOIMrU
I think acoustic curves did it better.
It looks a lot like AniMusic, see http://animusic.com/popups/clip-curve-wm.html and the whole site at http://animusic.com/
@ offsuit. dang, someone beat me to it.
>dang, someone beat me to it.
Yea, someone beat me to it too, but I didn’t know it because of this “Your comment is awaiting moderation” thing. What gives?
Maybe next time they should have somebody who actually knows how to play piano play the plucking instrument.
that’s awesome, someones done this from animusic right on!!! now play something on it and amplify it
that’s awesome! you need to tune it properly though and make a full 61-88 note version! wayne lytle would be proud!
Um is this not an over complicated piano? Lacking all the feel and emotion?
Very cool!
The servos make more noise than the strings.