21M.370 Digital Instrument Design

Student, Spring 2024

21M.370 is a technical class within MIT’s music department, where students create innovative digital musical instruments. Throughout the class, I made many simple instruments with box-like form factors and various buttons, switches, and sensors as inputs. For my final project, I created a wearable instrument, a glove that can modulate and layer my voice while I sing. It used flex sensors on the fingers and a capacitive sensor on the palm as the inputs. Programming-wise, I used C++ on the microcontroller to read and communicate the inputs to PureData, a visual programming language which controlled the audio settings.

The glove in progress, with a couple sensors implemented

Part of my PureData sensor-to-audio effect mapping

Concept sketch of my instrument

Skills: Electronics, programming (C++ & visual programming/PureData), sensor integration, audio editing/effects

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2.004 Dynamics & Control II Lab Assistant

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2.671 Measurement & Instrumentation