Irregular Incurve Robotic Instrument

irregular_incurve

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]

13 thoughts on “Irregular Incurve Robotic Instrument

  1. >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?

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