Summer Project: Step 3...and Info!

Hello again! I'm glad to announce that I've made some more progress on the project. By now you're probably dying to find out what the project is all about! No? Well, I'm going to tell you anyway. It's all about handling data, and here's how that works:

1. Read data from ADXL345 accelerometer onto the Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller.
2. Format and send data to computer (using this guy's code). This is what I've done so far, and using that same guy's code, I've modeled the accelerometer's movement, which looks pretty much exactly like this video. That is as much as I'm borrowing from that guy though!
3. Send accelerometer data to this script to allow the data to be read as a MIDI signal.
4. Enhance the Processing script from step 3 to recognise motion patterns (gestures and such) of the accelerometer. This is where I will apply my computer science skills! The script will output different MIDI signals for each motion pattern and hard-coded gesture to send a variety of outputs.
5. Send the MIDI data to music recording program of choice (Common Music, Max/MSP, Ableton Live, etc.)
6. Experiment with using the MIDI input to create motion and gesture controlled sounds, effects, filters, etc....It gets really interesting after this!
7.  Buy 5 more accelerometers, and connect them through a multiplexer to the microcontroller.
8. Strap the 6 accelerometers to my hand, placing one on the back of each fingernail/thumbnail, and one on the back of the palm.
9. Code more complex gestures involving relative angles, positions, and movements from each finger and the hand, and export these as MIDI data to music recording software.

And that's the project! I know, it's extremely ambitious. What I'm trying to do, in effect, is create a new instrument, that being the motions of the hand. Instead of manipulating hardware with your hands to affect music, this device could allow you to simply move sound with your hands themselves. It's a kind of instrument that, as far as I know, does not exist today, but could possibly open up some really interesting options and intuitions for music production and performance. I'd like to use it myself for that purpose, if it can be done! I'm pretty confident that it's possible, especially considering the work I've done thus far has gone off without a hitch, and has actually served to clarify how I'll proceed with the project. Basically, the data flows like this: accelerometer -> microcontroller -> motion processing script -> MIDI conversion script -> music recording software.

To calm you down after all the excitement you're feeling from reading that, here are a few really chilled out tracks. Check out Destiny by Zero 7, La Femme d'Argent by AIR, Dayvan Cowboy by Boards of Canada, and Little by Little by Groove Armada. Enjoy the links! My next post will be when I've made some progress on step 4, with basic motion recognition. Look forward to it!