PAMDI Music Box: Primarily Analogico-Mechanical, Digitally Iterated Music Box

PAMDI is an electromechanical music controller based on an expansion of the common metal music boxes. Our system enables an augmentation of a music box by adding different musical channels triggered and parameterized by natural gestures during the “performance”. All the channels are generated from the original melody recorded once at the start. We made a platform composed of a metallic structure supporting sensors that will be triggered by different natural and intentional gestures. The values we measure are processed by an arduino system that sends the results by serial communication to a Max/MSP patch for signal treatment and modification. We will explain how our embedded instrument aims to bring to the player a certain awareness of the mapping and the potential musical freedom of the very specific – and not that much automatic instrument that is a music box. We will also address how our design tackles the different questions of mapping, ergonomics and expressiveness and how we are choosing the controller modalities and the parameters to be