Myosic is for music making. It connects the Thalmic Myo and Leap Motion, in the form of MIDI controllers, to Ableton Live, a well-established and robust synthesizing software.

Our Thalmic Myo controls a drum kit. It only uses one hand gesture (as a stabilizer/calibrater); the rest of its functionality comes from its Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), which allows us to control the different drum sounds using the angle of the wearer's arm. After building and testing the Myo drum kit controller using Myo's built-in gestures (left and right swipe, thumb-to-pinky, etc.), we decided against this mechanic; the built-in gestures were simply too slow to rely on for something as time-sensitive as playing music. Ultimately, we programmed this component and its GUI in C++ and sfml, respectively.

The Leap Motion controls the synthesizer. It relies on both hand position and finger position to dictate the pitch and duration of each note, as well as which notes are being played. Each finger controls one note of a minor pentatonic scale. Moving the hand up and down controls the octave of the notes being played, and moving the hand left and right controls the duration of the looping notes.

Each of these systems generates MIDI output that Ableton Live reads and uses to create the musical output.

Overall, the final result is a fun instrument that requires no musical knowledge and only a little coordination to play. In the future, this hack could foreseeably be extended to accommodate multiple Myos or Leap Motions (each controlling a different instrument) for group playing. The interface could be streamlined and made more robust almost without bound; the only limit is really your musical creativity.

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