SLABS: Arrays of Pressure Sensitive Touch Pads

This is a follow-up to the previous post. See that post for some events where you can check out SLABs in person.

Some info via UC Berkeley's Center for New Music & Audio Technologies:

"Goal
Arrays of pressure sensitive touch pads provide musicians with an expressive interface that can be mapped by software to behave in a variety of ways. The SLAB was designed to engage the body, to be both musically expressive and inspiring, to be easy to play at the entry level, and to be accepting of a lifelong development of virtuosity. Instead of discrete triggering mechanisms to start and stop musical events we chose continuous signal representations as the basis for the instrument. We chose Ethernet for I/O and wrote specialized Core Audio compatible drivers for OSX allowing us to send gesture data as audio data. As a consequence, gestures are tightly coupled to the sound.

One SLAB contains 24 touch pads and another has 32. We chose Interlinks’s VersaPad because of its pressure output. The x, y, and pressure of each pad is sent at 44.1 kHertz. On the SLABS32 there are 96 channels. Core Audio and Max/MSP handle this number of channels with ease using only a small percentage of the CPU. The data from the pad sensors is assembled in a Xilinx FPGA which also provides for an audio return path and connections to MIDI (Input Only) and Light Pipe. The SLABS use the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol for programming a small display and two LED’s associated with each pad. OSC is sent to the host computer from the selector switches at the top of each column of pads."

Be sure to see UC Berkeley's Center for New Music & Audio Technologies for additional details and video.