The logic embedded in my NIME is actually rather simple. Eden, Shireen, and I all decided to make something wearable. They turned their ideas into a shirt and a pair of gloves. However, I was actually a bit uncertain about what to make at that time. My initial design was to turn the NIME into a kind of outer skin, like the concept of cyborg. The idea was actually practical given the small PCB (, which also restricted me from making a bigger and more complex NIME last week.) in terms of assembling, I intended to tape everything together, which would make the whole thing look more like skin, and it did turn out to yield some desired effects.
Then it came to the actual making part of the NIME. Given the reason that few can the soldered onto the small PCB, I decided to mainly incorporate the pitch division technique and took some time to find the best combination that generates the best beats. The soldered PCB looks like this:
Then I thought this might look too simple, and came up with some ideas to alter the resistor’s value in order to change the pitch. Therefore, I made another board with LDR, potentiometers, and resistor ladder, allowing alligator clips to freely switch between different modes. The board is like this:
About the performance part, I think we did it quite well, (apart from the fact that Eden was actually muted throughout the performance). The biggest progress from previous weeks is that everyone started to care more about the general flow of the music and made some corresponding changes to the volume and frequencies. However, I think the biggest weakness learned from last week’s performance might be the fact that none of us had made ourselves a switch that can control our NIMEs, which made the beginning and ending (I had to turn off the PA mixer to stop the music) quite chaotic. The next performance will be better.
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