Digital Finger Pan

This project takes inspiration from the hand pan, which is an acoustic instrument that requires tapping different parts of the instrument to play different sounds. What we did was we first decreased the size of the instrument to fit in your hand, then we made it digital, using pressure sensors to trigger individual sounds. We made the sensors work so that you can change the velocity at which you press each note. Lastly, we added a vibrato feature that just requires you to shake the hand pan up and down to get that funky pitch change you would get with a whammy bar on a guitar.

This project used housing that resembles a hand pan which was made using Fusion360 to CAD the electronics housing and then 3D print it. Then, we used an accelerometer for the vibrato and custom-made force-sensitive resistors for the sensors to control which note is being played. We used the pressure sensitivity from the sensors to change the velocity of the note depending on how hard you press the sensor. We used Arduino to take in this raw data and send it to MaxMSP through serial communication. Lastly, we output the music in MaxMSP using samples from Ableton that we created.

Open Source:

https://github.com/zagi9321/SynthUX_Hackathon_2023_Digital_Fingerpan