Development of a new musical instrument with improved universal design and higher freedom of expression

Abstract

Most of conventional musical instruments are not designed for everyone including disabled people. Here, we propose a “new instrument” having a higher level of universal design to provide chances to enjoy music for everyone including infant, aged or disabled people, by establishing necessary fundamental technologies to realize the new instrument. For the implementation, we use tablet computers and change intensity and/or pitch of the played sound based on the tracking data of user’s finger. The technical challenge is the difference of tracking resolution depending on the touch panel (or tracking device). In the present study, we show tracking intervals measured from several touch panels and discuss how we should interpolate the tracking data to suppress the difference in played sounds from different tablet computers.