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The musical gloves work nearly the same way as the Wandering Wands do, with light sensors and a midi board. I put a sensor in the pointer finger of the left glove and one in the palm of the right glove.
I had tried making Wandering Wands, but wasn't satisfied with how they looked or worked. I used chopsticks for the wands and just taped the wires on. My wires weren't very long (though I lengthened them some) and I have a midi board that needs to be plugged in, so it wasn't very satisfying to try to point them at stuff in a very restricted space. I wanted to be able to use my hands. |
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Here's a close-up of the sensor I put in the fingertip of the left glove. It is easy to point to a wide range of light and dark without having to move your hand much. I also like that the sounds change as you curl and uncurl your fingers.
The program maps the finger-tip light sensor to a glockenspiel sound. As you move your finger, it makes a lovely sound running up and down the scale. |
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Here's a close-up of the sensor I embedded in the palm of the glove. The program maps this sensor to percussion sounds. The midi percussion plays different instruments at different pitches: with low tones, you get a quiet, low rumbling. Higher tones are sharper (and seem louder).
I loved how this sensor worked: you hold your hand palm down, and raise and lower it from the table, a gesture similar to one a conductor might use to suggest volumes to an orchestra. The sounds the midi makes responded nicely to that movement. |
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Here's the program I used for the gloves. I found that the "%" math operation worked really well, but it doesn't work the way that I expected it to. But it sounded good, so I kept it.
You can try changing the instruments (change the top numbers in the "setinstr" blocks. Changing the lower numbers in the math "%" blocks will change the range of notes you get. You could try subtracting or dividing by a value, too.
Its hard to read the program in this tiny picture, so here's a larger version that should be more readable. |
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What I would change:
Perhaps the best improvement would be to shop earlier in the season. The only gloves left at Target in late August were kid-sized.
The other sort of obvious limitation is that the gloves are tethered to the cricket, the cricket is tethered to the midi board which in turn is tethered to both a power supply and the speakers. So the gloves are not portable.
Still, even with the short cords, the gloves allowed for pretty expressive experimenting and I really felt like I was "playing" them. The sounds went together well (and worked well for the types of movement I could do with my finger and my palm). |
