Musical Glove

2014

The musical glove is a gesture-based interface built by Sunnie Sang and to give musicians greater control over their performances and real-time experimentations.  

With 3 flex sensors sewn onto the fingers, the glove can affect the quality of ranges in music, such as volume and pitch, through simple finger bends. Using a contact switch and accelerometer, it can also play notes and effects when the index and thumb fingers are pressed together and when the wrist is rotated to the left and right.

The glove was built over the course of 3 weeks. For details on our entire design process, click here.

For circuit board, we used the Arduino Lilypad, which is designed for wearables.

The gloves we used came with "touch pods" that work with a mobile screen. We modified them into contact switches using conductive thread.

Design process

This was the most intricate and challenging physical project I’ve worked on. It required a careful layout, testing, and sewing of all wirings and parts. With every part we sewed on, we had to control test one by one.