Ubiquitous Drums
Look at the riders of any city bus. Many of them are plugged into their music players, tapping away to the beat. I propose to augment our natural love of rhythm into a ubiquitous wearable drum system. The target user of this system isn’t only the typical rhythm loving bus rider, but also an amateur drummer. Drum kits are heavy and unwieldy, making them difficult to transport to a jam session. The proposed system can also act as a stand-in for a full drum-kit for quick, impromptu jamming.
I took a pair of jeans and imbued them with two force-sensitive resistors, one on each knee. The left pocket houses a sparkfun box containing an arduino and a breadboard. Wires run through the pant legs to connect the pads to the box. Wiring the pants was surprisingly easy, since as I discovered, electric tape easily adheres to denim.
The two FSRs are hooked into pull-down switches which connect to analog ports of the Arduino. Every time a pad is hit, this Arduino sketch sends the pad ID and the force of the impact through the serial port. A python program running on my machine listens on the serial port and synthesizes sounds corresponding to the data using pyserial and pygame respectively.
This first prototype of Drum Pants is intentionally crude. Aside from increasing this system’s production value, there are a number of limitations that should be addressed. The current prototype requires a computer to synthesize sounds, which greatly hinders portability. By retrofitting the Arduino with a wifi shield, the system could communicate with any wifi-capable synthesizer, such as an Android phone.
Another issue with this system is that it’s built entirely into a pair of pants. This makes putting drum pads into other items of clothing impossible. To address this problem, the pads could wirelessly communicate to the Arduino device. In this case, the pads would be self-contained transmitters that could be placed anywhere. This opens up a wide variety of applications, such as placing the pad onto a pair of shoes to simulate a kick or hi-hat pedal. Do you like this idea? Please give me feedback below!
Update: Do you want to build your own drum pants? Check out this instructable!
Update 2: Accepted as a CHI 2010 WIP. Many thanks to Mark Gross! Extended abstract now available.
13 comments:
[...] this is a mirror of a blog post on my [...]
Brilliant.
With this, two things are certain:
1. “Office Casual” is here to stay; and
2. Neck ties are obsolete.
Pure genius! Pad in shoes? Why not! How about elbows? Gloves. Knee pads. This thing’s got legs, Boris, pardon the pun! work on this to be ready for next Christmas — you’re gonna be the next Pet Rock or Crocks or Data Glove or Rubik’s Cube, or whatever. Every kid’s gonna ask for a pair of shoes or jeans or whatever with drums.
I can imagine an entire percussion team — orchestra — each member wearing a set of these,of course, tuned differently. My son and I promise to buy a set each, assuming this comes out at a reasonable price to the market.
I’m sure the VC’s or other investors of your company are thrilled with your personal productivity. So now you want to perpetuate this behavior in workplaces throughout the world? Great. Your generation is putting the final nail in this already doomed society.
Rock On Junior!
BTW – a similar product was produced many years ago. Thomas Dolby was doing this in the 80’s, but you were probably just a gleam in your daddy’s eye back then.
I feel this completely atypical rage boiling up within me. Mr. John Bonham (if that IS your real name), you are a troll after my own heart!
ANYWAY, cool project. Why don’t you make the system self-contained, though? Having it rely on a computer (or wi-fi phone, for that matter) is both inconvenient and aesthetically undesirable, at least in my book.
[...] Ubiquitous Drums | Boris Smus (tags: diy music arduino) [...]
[...] Извечное желание людей хлопать себя до коленям и бёдрам в течение такт ритму вдохновило разработчика софта Бориса Смуса (Boris Smus) для необычный проект: он изготовил уклад под названием “Вездесущие барабаны” (Ubiquitous Drums). [...]
[...] vurup tempo tutmuş müziğe bir şekilde eşlik etmiştir. Tasarımcı Boris Smus’un Ubiquitous Drum Pant dediği icadı ise bu olayı birkaç daha öteye taşıyarak bacakların daha doğrusu pantolonun [...]
[...] Boris Smus via Craziest [...]
[...] engineer from Carnegie-Mellon, has fitted touch-sensitive resistors into his clothing to create the Ubiquitous Drums, a pair of pants that doubles as a drum [...]
wow,this is a cool idea,i am a drummer and find myself tapping on my knees all the time without even realizing it.
Thanks. The hard part is making it into a product