[STUART SCHMIDT USING HIS GLOVE CONTROLLER]

STUART SCHMIDT: I'm Stuart Schmidt. I go to school here at SAIC. This is my second year here. I don't really have a name for it or anything quite yet. It kind of spawned out of my fascination with Laetitia Sonami. She was here and she demonstrated her Lady's Glove and I just wanted to make one myself, and so the excuse came up in class.

I started out with the Nintendo power glove and I ended up finding my own bend sensors and pretty much throwing everything else away, but yeah it's a glove with five bend sensors on it. Bend or flex sensors, basically it's you send a voltage through it and the resistance of this sensor changes as it bends. So, as I bend it, the resistance goes lower or higher, whatever. My numbers go down. So, I have five of those, one on each finger here, and I have two photocells on the glove.

Originally, I started off with a friend of mine, who had an old Nintendo Power Glove, and I started messing around with that just to explore it because I had heard that it had bend sensors in it, and so I started with those and the glove itself was kind of this huge, intimidating thing, and it was funky and kind of hard to work with so I ended up just scrapping it and finding my own glove and finding my own. I got new bend sensors because a couple of them were burnt out on it, and then I just have a box here that I built for this series of switches so I have control for other parameters and things.

I had it around, and I needed a housing to hold the boards and stuff and it just fit and ten there was this ridiculous design on the inside of it so I just had to use that and like highlight it, so. Yeah, I have this set up so that these three switches here control one of these different sets. When I turn this switch on, now my glove is controlling this bank of samples here.

When I was putting together the box, there's a little bit of finagling and trying to get all the wires and everything to work right, make sure I don't have anything crosswired or having weird problems like that.

[STUART SCHMIDT USING HIS GLOVE CONTROLLER]

We had a workshop with the Artbus, which is a really cool interface, microcontroller interface that's been developed at this school. It doesn't have an actual computing brain on it. Everything runs through a computer or something else. It's really simple to use for interfacing, and it has a lot of ability to expand and I can just plugin more boards and have more slots for sending and receiving signals and just doing fancy things like that.

For this particular project, I actually have two patches running here. One is a setup I built for actually receiving and routing all the signals to the proper places because there's a few bugs in the hardware, and so this is my way of working around that so I can make sure everything is going where it's supposed to. It's a granular synthesis setup, and I have individual control over, you know, I have the -- I have basically two sets -- two pairs of sample players that are playing a preloaded sample, and then my fingers are controlling -- I have control over each individual play speed, the pitch, and the volume controller is on my thumb.

[STUART SCHMIDT USING HIS GLOVE CONTROLLER]

I got my hands on this, the Artbuses, in class for this workshop and so for a couple of days there, I was sitting around trying to figure out an excuse to keep it because they have this deal with the school. As long as I make something that's cool enough, I guess, they'll allow me to keep it and use it as an actual like piece of art or something. And so, I was sitting around, thinking for a while, and then it was just like you know what screw it. I've been wanting to do this for a while and so I did it [LAUGHING].

The biggest obstacle is really once I built the thing was I was sitting there like trying to figure out a patch that was really interesting and fun to play with. It was like I have all these controls and then it's like thinking about what you want them to do. I really wanted to have a set up so that I can record live audio to the buffers so I can sample from a performance and manipulate it. I meant that would probably be the most possible way that I can do this in a real band setting or something like that. [LAUGHING]

[STUART SCHMIDT USING HIS GLOVE CONTROLLER]

It was a big relief when everything got together. I guess the surprise was like once I got it working how cool and how interesting it was to have tactile control like this over a patch, and it's a totally different experience than like just sitting there twisting knobs. Probably, I'd like to make things a little clearer, probably build a better glove that has a bit more connection or maybe build multiple bend sensors so that I can get articulation for all my joints in my fingers. On the hardware end of it, if I'm able to actually keep these microcontrollers that are in it, I would like to actually solder all the pins in it or all the wires and everything because right now they're just kind of plugged in there and praying that I don't shake it too hard and things go loose. That's why now things are actually glued together. I could take this apart right now if I wanted to.

I want it so that I can just like ignore the laptop at all, just have it hidden away. I think that's the big thing in the sound department it seems especially in like the Max/MSP classes like trying to hide the computer. It's so much more magical when you're just waving your hand, you have no idea why it's doing what it's doing.

I'm just doing this out here because of the lights, the photosensors, I can hide the light.

[STUART SCHMIDT USING HIS GLOVE CONTROLLER]

Right now, I'm just messing around with one of my sets of samples, slowing down the pitch and the speed real low, and then from here would just start [LAUGHING]. It's just messing around with things, bending my fingers more or less until I hear something that sounds good.

I really like the sound in the Art and Tech Departments at SAIC. They're a lot more like they're brand new. Kind of it feels like there's a lot more like vibrant energy and it's a little bit more chill to compared to some of the more traditional classes that you can take in this school.