In this assignment, I was exploring the relations between moving fabrics and music pieces. I chose the music piece from Judas Maccabeus shown below:

“judas maccabaeus violin sheet music suzuki”的图片搜索结果
The Chorus Part from Judas Maccabeus

For the fabric movement, I wanted to explore the movement of individual corners on one piece of fabric. Each corner is individually controlled by one capstan. Before starting the rigging, I made a plan for the music as shown in the picture. (For technical reasons, I only incorporated the first and the second line)

The planned that is based on the music piece
The more detailed plan for setup and control

Reflection on the assignment:

  1. Making a plan does help with performing the piece out on the lauchpad. However, the setup took too long so I didn’t have enough time to practice enough times.
  2. The rigging process is surprisingly simple and complicated. It made simple with a drawn out plan. But, there were a lot of times that the string is “unwinded” from the capstan and stuck on the stepper motor shaft. There were also times that the strings start to wind onto the capstan on its own.
  3. I found it interesting how different amount of pressure on the launch pad also affect the outcome/control, which I wasn’t really expecting.
  4. Even though the beats are off, I did played the piece out with some rythm, and followed my plan I had. However, the control is harder to manipulate than I expected that when I was trying to recreate the imagery of a piece of fabric floating in the air, it wasn’t very successful