The textural music glove interprets the texture of a material as music. A participant wears the glove and headphones and drags their left index finger across a surface. A piezoelectric element vibrates with the motion of the finger across the surface and the vibrations are filtered through the circuit on the headphones and then processed by the Arduino microcontroller.
The notes played by the system are based on a markov chain generated from a piece of MIDI music (any MIDI file can be used to generate the transition table). As signals are generated by the piezoelectric material, the Arduino code aggregates the strength of the signals. Once the signal aggregation reaches a certain threshold, the next transition in the Markov chain is triggered. The result is music that is more staccato on a rougher surface, and music that is more melodic on a smoother surface.
The Textural Music Glove was used as part of Materiality.
The code for the Textural Music Glove is available on github at https://github.com/dkadish/textural-music/.