D-Touch Drum Machine

June 30, 2009 12:11 AM

Print your own DIY papercraft drum machine. Webcam + paper template + free software = drum machine with tangible interface. [via]

"The d-touch drum machine is a drum machine with a tangible user interface: it is controlled by placing and arranging physical objects on an A4 piece of paper, which we call the interactive area. The interactive area is arranged in 11 rows, each row corresponds to a different sound, as indicated by the text labels. The horizontal position of the blocks on the interactive area determines the timing of the sound trigger within the loop."

For wider applications there's the Trackmate project. Trackmate.sourceforge.net is "an open source initiative to create an inexpensive, do-it-yourself tangible tracking system. The Trackmate Tracker allows any computer to recognize tagged objects and their corresponding position, rotation, and color information when placed on a surface. "

Further reading: heapsa links at wikipedia; related: previously.

posted by mhjb (3 comments total)

I was expecting a nice jokey way to download classic papercraft drum machines. I certainly didn't expect to see an actual working system that uses a web camera, some software and some foldable paper blocks to trigger the drum sounds. Nice one.
posted by awfurby at 1:42 AM on June 30, 2009

What platforms is this available on? I don't feel like filling out that long registration form just to be denied a Mac version.
posted by egypturnash at 5:24 AM on June 30, 2009

Available for Windows and OSX, with Linux coming soon.

I used login details 'fake', 'fake', and '[e-mail]' - I imagine this will work for anyone that doesn't want to be bugged.
posted by mhjb at 5:39 AM on June 30, 2009