Manifest

The Paper FingerPhone, a sustainably designed electronic Musical Instrument

Fri, 01/26/2018 - 16:00 — AdrianFreed
The first paper FingerPhone was created to demonstrate conductive paper at the East Bay Maker Faire. It was built using the speaker in a large musical greeting card that Hallmark used to make with a bending mode transducer.

The next version used a pizza box as the resonator to demonstrate reuse as the sustainability aspect was emphasized..

Eventually it was placed on cardboard to be attached to poster board where it won "Best Poster" award at the NIME conference.

The conference paper associated with that poster presentation was chosen for inclusion in the NIME reader.

See video

A FingerPhone you can buy!

Mon, 06/08/2020 - 09:29 — AdrianFreed
The FingerPhone in it's commercial manufacturable form fflarge.jpg

Tablo Sensing

Thu, 06/27/2019 - 20:06 — AdrianFreed
The tablo senses position of the draped conductive fabric using the ring of conductive plastic strips on the bowl. Pressure is sensed using the piezoresistive fabric strips around the annulus surrounding the bowl.

Circuit Layout Design Patterns for eTextiles Appliqués with Conductive Fabric

Sun, 04/22/2018 - 16:34 — AdrianFreed
In the usual approach to PCB layout traces are laid out to connect signals and power to the pads of packaged parts and I/O connectors. This is a style that evolved for very high speed digital circuits. One usually also employs ground and/or power planes or a ground flood.

This style is not convenient for eTextile Appliqués which are most commonly single-sided and are based on cut traces rather than etched boards.

The Paper FingerPhone: a case study of Musical Instrument Redesign for Sustainability

Mon, 01/15/2018 - 15:38 — AdrianFreed

Commentary proposed for NIME Reader

The fingerphone is my creative response to three umbridges: the waste and unsustainability of musical instrument manufacturing practices, the prevailing absence of long historical research to underwrite claims of newness in NIME community projects, and the timbral poverty of the singular, strident sawtooth wavefrom of the Stylophone – the point of departure for the fingerphone instrument design.