Construction of a System for Easy Prototyping of Painted Musical Instruments

Abstract

Recently there have been many works of research and products which make use of electronic and information technology to equip a piece of paper with interactive functions. Examples include picture books which output animal noises, and the use of electric circuits drawn on paper, in conductive ink, to facilitate the output of light and sound. However, these technologies do not have a function that enables customization of the output that is linked to an input interface. The instrument's sound is composed of various kinds of tone and pitch and the effect of a single note is different from that of chords and melody. When users are designing a painted musical instrument they find out problems with the instrument and then discuss and test the design using the customize function, which selects and outputs the sound of the instrument. Therefore, the goal of our study is to construct a system for easy prototyping of painted musical instruments. By drawing shapes on the paper with conductive ink users create input interfaces to which they can then assign different sounds flexibly and intuitively.