Music Analyser

I'll begin this week's post with a little story of the inspiration behind my design. Back in high school I played the violin in the school orchestra. Often during rehearsal, receiving personal feedback on how you're playing was difficult. Especially for string instruments, it is often very hard to stay in tune or be pitch perfect. So I've developed a design for the good measure brief that will measure how accurate a student is playing a piece of music. The target audience will be string instrument students.

 

The device will analyse the player's musical accuracy by comparing the players pitch and timing relative to average pitch and timing of the rest of the orchestra. It will be clamped to the body of the string instrument. It will simply output a percentage of accuracy after the user has decided to stop the device from recording. Obviously the device will have its limitation such as the inability to measure tone and articulation.

 

Upon the completion of my soft model, it was clearly evident that the size and proportion of the device will need be explored thoroughly. Fitting the technical package and designing a user-friendly interface is one of the challenges I've faced in designing such a small measuring device.

 

Another challenge has been making the form be not so intrusive when clamped to the violin. During the development stages, I've have made the form more organic and uniform. I've also tried to make the juxtaposition between the modernism of the device and the traditional and conservative form not so strong.

 

Since I am not undertaking model-making class this semester, I have not yet started on the hard model (:S). Hopefully I will commence construction shortly after I have refined the interface and form of my design.

 

-Phi Do