Musical Navigatrics


Musical Navigatrics extends our previous work on passive, tangible musical interfaces, first demonstrated in our Musical Trinkets project. The Navigatrics hardware has several enhancements, including the ability to drive three mulitplexed reader coils (allowing, for example, independent degrees of control along the horizontal axis for a planar coil arrangment), higher position and frequency resolution, and a stabilized sweep oscillator. Most tags also have switches that allow them to be activated and deactivated on the fly, enabling their associated parameters to be conviently latched. The Navigatrics musical mapping also attempts to go beyond the simple, direct, music "toy" environment of Musical Trinkets, allowing dynamic assembly and complex manipulation of musical sequences. Any action with the tagged interfaces can also be dynamically recorded, played, and overdubbed with other control manipulations, allowing a Musical Navigatrics performance to achieve a high level of complexity and sonic density.

Video clips of Musical Navigatrics in action:

A short clip (7.8 Meg) showing Laurel demoing (May 2002) the Navigatrics system at NIME 2002 at MLE in Dublin

A long clip (35 Meg) showing Laurel demoing (May 2002) the Navigatrics system at NIME 2002 at MLE in Dublin

An older clip (15.3 Meg) from December 2001 showing an early version of the system when a primitive Navigatrics mapping was being tested

Publications about this system

Electromagnetic Tagging for Electronic Music Interfaces, Paradiso, J.A., Pardue, L.S., Hsiao, K, Benbasat, A.,Y., to appear in the Journal of New Music Research, December 2003.

Musical Navigatrics: New Musical Interactions with Passive Magnetic Tags, Pardue, L.S., Paradiso, J.A., Proc. of the 2002 Conference on New Instruments for Musical Expression (NIME-02), Dublin, Ireland, May 24-26, 2002, pp. 168-169.

Development of An Improved Swept RF Tagging System and its Musical Applications, L.P. Smith, MS Thesis, MIT Media Lab, January 2002.

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Laurel Smith


Joe Paradiso