JUKE Cylinder
Musical Instrument | 2011
JUKE Cylinder is a cylindrical interactive device to metamorphose hands to various musical instruments like a guitar, a piano, a flute, and users are able to control the pitches of the sound like those real musical instruments. With our system, people can feel that the sound is generated on their hands, and have an illusion that their hands metamorphose to a musical instrument.
・Concept
If you knock an object, it sounds. If you play music, loudspeakers sound. The sound you usually listen to is generated by actions or objects supposed to generate sound. However, the development of parametric loudspeakers made it possible for people to feel that the sound comes from actions or objects which are not supposed to generate sound. Because the sound generated by the parametric loudspeaker has very strong straightness and narrow directivity, and the sound image is localized on the reflected surface when the sound hit something. The concept of our study is to metamorphose hands to any musical instrument by localizing the sound image on the hands, and make it possible for users to control the pitches of the sound.
・Implementation
This is the whole view of JUKE Cylinder. It consists of four parametric loudspeakers, two Kinects, eight dimmable LEDs, and four fog machines. All parametric speakers are put on the upper part to localize the sound image on the hands. All Kinects are also put on the upper part to get the depth data of hands, and decide the pitch of the sound and the brightness of the LEDs.
・Interaction
The interaction with JUKE Cylinder is to hold one’s hands to the misted light and go up and down them. When users hold their hands to the light, the parametric loudspeakers output sounds to them. The fog machines are used to visualize the ray of LEDs and lead users to hold their hands to the light. The mist from their hands looks like the sound is spreading from them. This effect makes users to recognize that the sound is coming from their hands. When one to four users play with JUKE Cylinder simultaneously, a beat sound is generated with the original sound, and users feel cooperativeness with others.
