No, what the fuck has any of that got to do with anything?
Bro, it’s all in the holy books! Never skip book day!
Yes, indeed, that would be remote control … Making music for me requires more than just triggering loops. Imogen’s singing was amazing and it would have been great without all the bells and whistles.
Well, here I am, 3 years later, searching the Net for this kind of controllers.
I saw the [Altura MK2+] (Altura MkII+ Theremin MIDI Controller / Arpeggiator - Zeppelin Design Labs) that can act as a theremin as well but it’s not available in Europe and i’m afraid tariffs war going on would not play on my advantage.
Also, it’s a small company and they don’t seem super sure that their product works with every MIDI device.
So that’s it for sensor controllers: Leap motion or any other camera one, the only ring one surviving seems to be the Genki Wave and the one Hymogen Heap uses is at 2700USD.
For something similar to the Altura take a look at the Baloran BumBleBee just out, and being shown right now at SynthFest France. ( post )
It’s expensive but has two hands both with three axis of motion detection.
Also if you haven’t, take a look at the Loopop video in the first post of this thread.
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Are you looking for polished consumer-ready products, or do you just have gestural control ideas that you want to realize some way, any way?
I ask because the basic tech is cheap. Like, I can get a tiny 32 bit computer with a built-in IMU (movement/acceleration sensor) for under $30, and then convert that sensor data to MIDI. I am not particularly into gestural control (I like physical knobs and buttons) but I’ve made a little thing like that to clip onto my barbell and monitor the consistency of my weightlifting. The smallest sensors I know for this are about thumb-size, though that’s with a plastic casing. The actual sensors are quite a bit smaller but they’re usually mounted on a small circuit board for convenience.
It wasn’t that hard to do the weightlifting measurement thing. I feel the main challenges here would be smoothing the raw sensor data a bit, perhaps approximately fitting it to curves or scaling/quantizing it, and thinning it consistently enough to not choke the low-bandwidth MIDI signal without introducing lag. The company whose products I use for this also makes a MIDI interface and I had been thinking to buy some to try making my own custom CC controller or some kind of sequencer module.
By scaling/quantizing, I’m thinking that you might not want a purely linear relationship between gestures and CC. Say for simplicity that you wanted to get music information out of how open/closed your elbow joint is, like you were playing a trombone. If you flex your elbow you can feel how much more loosely it moves around in the middle of travel rather than when you arm is near fully folded up or stretched out. Or you might want to take acceleration into account so that slower movements would allow you to make finer control adjustments (not unlike the Elektron encoders).
So what exactly do you want to be able to do, and what are your constraints/deal breakers?
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For me, it would be mainly:
- having a MIDI out
- being able to map the sensors to any CC
- having a mute button and presets would be a big plus
- being as compact and lightweight as possible
- standard powering (like USB-C for instance)
I don’t really know what’s possible so for the rest I can’t really tell.
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CC mapping is not difficult, the main task would be designing a simple and reliable user interface. The easiest way to do this might be with a simple web page app you could control from your phone. I know this is possible as I made one before to test something. Selecting CC #s for a list of sensor controllers is very basic (just some drop down list selectors and a ‘save’ button). Presets would be some additional effort but not too much, it’s just a list-of-parameter-lists.
MIDI and USB power are non-issues. Lightweight and compact are pretty easy. The main constraint I see is that depending on how elaborate you want to get, you might have a bunch of wires you need to wear, eg along your sleeves going back to a belt pack or something.
By a mute button, do you mean a separate switch to operate with your hand (carried in your hand) or a footswitch or something like that?
So those things are features that can be added on to the basic functionality. But my question was more about what you want to do physically/musically. Do you want gloves where every finger is a controller? A ‘MIDI sword’ or batons, like air traffic marshals who wave them at pilots on airport runways? Or do you want a set of ‘special’ gestures you can perform in a sequence? (This seems to be what the Genki wave offers…it seems like a neat product, but very over-engineered in ways) Do you want to wave your arms around in time with a beat and have your arm movements (and/or your legs/head) control MIDI CCs? How many different CCs do you want to control, and how precisely? As I said, I am not really into the gestural control idea for my own music-making, so I have not thought too much about it and only know some demonstrations by artists like Imogen Heap and Laurie Anderson, which always seemed more like a technology demo than a natural way of music expression.
Like, if I’m in the audience at your show, what do I see you doing that’s shaping the music? Let your imagination run free and I will be able to make a guess about what could be possible.
I’m going to put in an order for some parts this month because tariff prices go up at the beginning of May and then again in June (I order direct from China and usually only spend $1-200 but they will be putting minimum tariffs of $150!! on even small orders like this). So if your ideas seem feasible I could just add some extra parts. I wanted to do a MIDI project anyway and generating MIDI data from movement sensors does not seem much more difficult than doing it from knobs/encoders.
For now, I’d start simple: just moving hands closer to an emitter would for example act on the filter cut off. Before diving into learning how to play a full show with complicate gestures, it needs to be musical before all (I agree with you: most things i’ve seen online are just technical demos). I’m a guitar player so it has to be simple for now and not interfere with the guitar playing. Hence a mute button, so i don’t trigger accidentally the thing.
I also like the idea to trigger stuff with my guitar neck, getting closer or far from an emitter.
Very kind of you, unfortunately, i’m in Europe so new tariffs would apply 
I actually found someone selling a simple Theremin like device on the net with basic options and a webpage to configure the CC and the few options. I asked the seller about the latency, that’s the main issue i could see although it has a MIDI out which would reduce it compared to bluetooth let’s say.
For now, I would not invest crazy time/money working with an air controller, it’s just a fancy option to have in order to be more expressive and visual that 2 knobs. For instance on the Digitone, it can be nice to control 2 parameters at once which are not on the same menu/page.
I hear you. I’m going to throw in a few extra parts on my order anyway (assuming Trump doesn’t change the tariffs again next week lol) to see what this involves. IT’s so cheap to prototype simple ideas that it’d be a shame not to experiment.
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