Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “New Musical Interface: Onyx Ashanti’s Beatjazz Controllers”.
Something like it in the 90s, with uh the keyboards and then when the laptops came along. I completely shifted to laptops and then over time you know i would be doing production with my win mini controller. You know, because that was basically my keyboard. I would use that to play my drums or my bass or these different elements, and eventually i realized i could play all of them. I didn’t have to take just one, so i devised a method to be able to play. All of them live looping, fit the build, so i kind of started working on the concept of jazz as a way to kind of keep the live, looping from just being a stack of loops and have a kind of a narrative trajectory. It’S basically a three-way wireless network center pack is where the wireless transmitter is for the mouthpiece.
This is so it’s kind of like when you play like this there’s an accelerometer in each one, so i can control my parameters by moving my hands boxes. I kind of designed these boxes just so that i would have a good um finger positioning so that i’d have a good place to control octaves things of that nature. They house all the um, the mechanics for the system, the arduino and the xp are in here.
The accelerometer is here between the forefinger and the thumb so that i can uh basically control the accelerometer like this, and then i have my z-axis pressing. These are force-sensing resistors, so they’re pressure sensitive. So i haven’t programmed to send a note on off, basically um or a combination of them send note on off, like a sax, a bone, fingering method uh when i press each one a little bit harder, because the lights change, which indicates the different um instrument type Like bass or or leads or drums that kind of thing using say like this joystick, if i push it forward, i have effects that come in that i can record that basically just affect everything but turn off as soon as i let it go.
This mouthpiece is basically just connected to a pressure sensor and that allows me to um to basically instantiate the um, the pressure at which the note is triggered, as well as a control variable to control things like filters or whatever. The mouthpiece design is a silicone based. Putty, you know you mix the two pieces together and you’ve got about five minutes to form it, and so i designed it so that it would um kind of stay locked into place so that i don’t have to so that it doesn’t blow out of my mouth. Every time i play it’s less of a thing of dancing as a performance method and more of a um, abstract, emotion, type of thing: it’s not a thing of of trying to entertain people with like choreography or any of that stuff.
It’S just that they’re. You know once you have that freedom. There are certain natural things that just tend to kind of come out: uh that is relative to dance and using dance motions, actually um. It helps more with narrative than the gestural aspect because to the accelerometers um.
This is the same as this: the accelerometer doesn’t care. My hands can stay right here all night. Most of the time when i play this hand is usually right here and it’s doing this because my volume is there, so i’m controlling the volume of what i’m recording by doing this, and so so a lot of times i’ll be doing stuff with this hand. But this hand is always on this plane.
You know so there’s always that thing. So it’s like there will be that narrative that i’m trying to get across with the movement, but the actual accelerometer control is still you know. Keeping that hand on that plane. I mean actually um, you know practicing a lot so that you can.
So when you hear in your head uh a certain theme, that’s based on the room that you’re in based on the people you’re playing to this. Based on these things, you can play it. You don’t have to play something like it. You can play it. That’S to me, improvisation, that’s the goal to be able to play exactly what you hear in your head.
When you hear it the way you hear it and that’s where the technology comes in, because i don’t have to live within the limitations of drums or uh or a saxophone or a keyboard, you know i can have all of those things and as long as the Interface allows me to jump amongst them easily. Then i can paint the picture that i want with the sounds that i have and i can create those sounds .