Presented At
Priceless Festival: 2015-2019, 2022-2024
Jazz Technology Workshop: 2017
Figment Boston: 2016
The Shipley School: 2016
Private functions: 2015-present
Touchtone fosters direct human connection through the medium of exploratory play. This interactive piece invites participants to engage in a tactile, auditory, and visual experience that is free from specific objectives, promoting a shared sense of wonder and delight.
Paper craft by Deborah Yoon Zacharias
video: Justin Oliphant
Details
Touchtone explores human touch through musical reactivity. The project started by measuring the small changes in electrical resistance made by a human "circuit". After a great deal of trial and error and the addition of many layers of signal processing, I arrived at its current incarnation; a generative music system activated by skin-to-skin contact. Touchtone outputs MIDI to control various synthesizers, turning human touch itself into a musical instrument. To create visual feedback I additionally created a system to control multiple incandescent lights. The work I have put into this project over the years has taught me a great deal about low voltage electronics, signal processing, AC power dimming, radio interference, grounding, music theory, synthesizer control, and woodworking.
One of the earliest versions of Touchtone involved a 2015 collaboration with Xiao Xiao, a Media Lab alumna. We used the touch input to control a player piano so that while she was playing music directly on the piano, I was playing music on her arm algorithmically derived from the notes she was playing (see below).
