SAM TOPLEY

ball

'ball' instrument. A knitted wireless controller for electronic music.
PACE Studio, De Montfort University, Leicester UK. December 2015.

ball is a response to the provocation of 'One Knob To Rule Them All', an intensive short research project between the Culture Lab, Newcastle University, Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University and guests from Tongji University, Centre for Digital Innovation, Shanghai. One Knob to Rule Them All is an idea presented by John Bowers in: Musical Meshworks: From Networked Performance to Cultures of Exchange. In this article, Bowers considers an interface that is " ... a single control ... inviting for a novice user but one which had unexpected built in complexity to hold the attention of an experienced user."

As a response to this idea, ball explored the creation of a 'knobless', knitted interface for the playful and expressive control of electronic sound.

Initial investigations explored ideas in capacitive sensing, using conductive thread weaved through the chunky knitting, to turn the object into a tactile interface responsive to skin contact. This is an example of an alternative approach to the knob within the relatively 'knobless' field of electronic textiles.




'Knob' swatch.
Four conductive thread tracks with knotted ports, woven through super chunky garter stitch.
Digital Cultures Studio, Culture Lab, Newcastle University. December 2015.


Upon further exploration, it became preferable to retain more 'knob-like' qualities to the object with regards to performer gestures, and so internal sensors were used to instead sonify the movement of the ball. The embedded Bluetooth sensors allow the ball to communicate with Pure Data and its movement to be tracked. Designed in collaboration with John Bowers, the Pure Data patch sonifies the accelerometer axis data to generate unpredictable sequences of sound with variations in amplitude and stereo spatialisation. See a video demonstration of the patch below:

A post shared by sam topley (@samtopley) on Aug 16, 2017 at 7:10am PDT

The ball was then presented in an improvisatory performance piece for small ensemble, with the only directions being for the ball to be the rolled between members of the ensemble. Within the often chaotic and frantic soundworld, particular musical interest came after the performer had investigated the object and it became halted; then sounding fragments of a sequence and on occasion, falling silent. The accessible form of the object also encouraged further interaction with the audience who later moved the object around the performance space. Other performance gestures included full body knob turning, careful knob passing and playful games of catch.




'ball' performance.
PACE Studio, De Montfort University, Leicester UK. December 2015.

ball is published in "One Knob To Rule Them All: Reductionist Interfaces for Expansionist Research" in the proceedings of the international conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), Brisbane, Australia, 2016, pp. 433-438.

Read the full 'One Knob To Rule Them All' project blog here.

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