I have cheesy-ly named it 'Red Handed' and it works as follows:
I program a patch in PD which plays specific sounds when triggered by the recognition of a colour shown to the inbuilt camera on my mac. i.e when it see's the colour blue it plays a sine/saw/square wave in C, when it see's green it plays D.
The idea is to make special hand attachments which are laminated card or squares of PVC plastic fastened to the hands and fingers via velcro straps. These pieces of card/plastic will be in a variety of colours, all differing from each other.
This diagram shows how the instrument will work more clearly:
Therefor to perform the user must hold up their hands to the camera and do various hand gestures in order to create music.
Positives about this idea: It could be upscaled to a camera filming a stage and people walking on in coloured t shirts in order to trigger the notes/effects. The sounds/effects triggered can be altered to create any kind of soundscape or arrangement imaginable.
Difficulties I may encounter when creating this instrument: Lighting will be a very important issue in getting the camera to recognise colours as the lighting automatically adjusts and is always changing on the macs inbuilt camera, this could be resolved by using a better quality camera and linking it up to PD instead although cost of purchasing this camera would be an issue.
I am not very skilled with Pure Data yet I know what I am proposing is possible to do using it, this means I will need to do a lot of research regarding patch building, for colour recognition through the camera triggering the sounds.
Overall this instrument is designed to make the on stage performances of solo artists more interesting and incorporating almost dance like arm movements into them, it will give musical performance more dynamic which is always something I always feel I need to improve on when I perform, rather than stood statically, tapping my foot at most.
Updates on this project will be posted throughout the various stages.
