Sculpton: A Malleable Tangible Interface For Sound Sculpting

This paper seeks to outline the development of SculpTon, a malleable tangible interface for sound sculpting oriented to live performance. Within our concept, shaping sound is an equivalent of physically shaping an object. The recent reflexion on “computational materials” and “Radical Atoms” in TUIs has prompted us to imagine what possible applications in the context of NIME. In our interface the musical expression is made through the use of real-time formant synthesis in the form of a three dimensional, organically shaped object, which can be handled and modified by the user. Firstly, we describe the development and the design principles of the SculpTon interface. Since the notion of malleable interface was already explored in research fields such as TUIs, OUIs and NIME, we are going to recapitulate some previous works. Next, we introduce the technical implementation of the device and the embedded sensor array developed ad hoc. Drawing from such elements, we eventually describe the methods by which useful features were extracted and the mapping techniques used to deploy these features as control data for real-time sound synthesis.