In the Fall of 2007, undergraduate Nathan Ward presented several demonstrations of his CUMotive system, the culmination of his work in music and engineering (CEMC, Electrical Engineering), part of his independent major. CUMotive was the recipient of the 2008 “Where’s the BOOM” Award at Cornell’s Bits on Our Mind (BOOM) technology exhibition.
CUMotive code and information is available online. See here for a more complete description of the work as presented for ECE 4760, Designing with Microcontrollers. This work was also presented at the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) Conference 2008 in a paper entitled Wearable Interfaces for Cyberphysical MusicalExpression. CEMC and Professor Kevin Ernste appear in the acknowledgements.
Nathan began at CEMC as a student of Music 1421 and proceeded to take a series of courses through Music 6420/4420 followed by an Independent Study focussed on the work below. In addition to this series of demonstrations (in Lincoln Hall B20), Ward presented this work in 2009 as a composition for live contortionist and electronics (excerpt below).
An example of a wireless accelerometer system with gesture recognition capabilities:
A few examples using a custom wearable accelerometer system as a gaming controller: