The motivation behind this project stems from my interest for the variety of sounds a guitar can produce, although I am mainly a keyboard player.
One of the expressions I have always wanted to reproduce on a keyboard are bends and vibratos. The effects are subtle, but they definitely add something to licks. Especially when a nice long bend slowly, asymptotically pass the Blue note and lands on the 5th..
There are ways to do that by using the pitch wheel featured on some keyboards. But it's a bit awkward. It's like using a whammy bar to bend a note. So I thought, why not make a keyboard a 2-dimensional device?
We use one dimension to run through all the notes - what about extracting information about the position of the player's hands along the perpendicular?
In the setup described in the video, a camera continuously tracks the position of the player's hands and sends displacement positions along one dimension to an arduino, which handles MIDI communication. The result is fairly intuitive. Slide your hand away and the bend goes up, slide towards your body and the band goes opposite.
Improvements to come:
1) I had a new idea for quick tracking of the hand
2) Make this a standalone device by using a Raspberry Pi and doing the image processing on the RPi's GPU
3) Automatic calibration to register displacements occurring over the keyboard region only.
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