Development Blog - Gazwilde/The-Air-Guitar GitHub Wiki

After initial discussions with both subject lecturers and peers, the idea to create a guitar that almost anyone could play, regardless of their musical ability was conceived. There are many reasons, and many different groups of people who could use The-Air-Guitar. It could be used as part of music therapy, and used regardless of a persons mobility or musical ability, in ways a normal guitar can not.

The idea was to track what each hand is doing to represent the motions of playing the fretboard and plucking strings to emulate a real guitar.

Music therapy.

Study into music therapy shows the importance of music in helping babies, children and adults.

 " Music therapy is an established psychological clinical intervention, which is delivered by HCPC  __
   registered music therapists to help people whose lives have been affected by injury, illness or __
   disability through  supporting their psychological, emotional, cognitive, physical, communicative__
   and social needs." (BAMT 2017)

The-Air-Guitar could help people who have disability, limited mobility, illness or find it difficult to communicate, through music therapy. The process of learning an instrument to play some of your favourite songs or write your own songs on guitar can be difficult. It takes finger dexterity and hours of practice. It is the goal of The-Air-Guitar to give access to children and adults, with or without disabilities or injuries to play and write songs, using it as a building block to gaining a knowledge of music, music theory and playing an instrument.

Weeks

• Initial idea and research
• Basic patching to understand Max MSP
• Purchase of equipment
• Using Max to get video input from camera
• Tutorial
• Creating patch for camera splits
• Tutorial
• Creating patch for colour tracking
• Tutorial
• Creating number outputs from camera bangs to create Midi Notes
• Tutorial
• Practicing with the instrument to recreate songs