audio performance with the unicorn interface

Year:

2007

Authors:

Georg Holzmann

Project Description:

The unicorn is the only fabulous beast that does not seem to have been conceived out of human fears.
In even the earliest references he is fierce yet good, selfless yet solitary, but always mysteriously beautiful (see picture1).
He could be captured only by unfair means, and his single horn was said to neutralize poison.
(Marianna Mayer)

picture1: the electronic unicorn

An unicorn skeleton found at Einhornhöhle ("Unicorn Cave") in Germany's Harz Mountains in 1663 proves that the so-called unicorn had only two legs, one white "magic" hand and four mysterious plates out of metal (see picture2).
The skeleton was examined by Leibniz, who had previously doubted the existence of the unicorn, but was convinced thereby.

picture2: mysterious plates, magic hand

People also were overhelmed by the singing of unicorns, which radiated exquisite colors and sounded like a thousand wind chimes (look at the download section below for a free record).
Dr. Conrad Gesner of Zürich pretty much summed it up in the seventeenth century, when he said:
The sound of this horn is useful and beneficial against epilepsy, pestilential fever, rabies, proliferation and infection of other animals and vermin, and against worms within the body from which children faint.

the interface

The unicorn interface consists of 3 main parts:
a glove with contacts on the fingertips (see picture5), a board with 4 contact plates (see picture3) and a potentiometer on the forehead, the unicorn (see picture4).
The goal of the interface is, to be able to control various parameters at the same time.

picture3: board with 4 contact plates

picture4: the unicorn and its potentiometer

picture5: glove with contacs

If you touch one of the four contact plates, you can control a specific parameter with the unicorn, relative to it's current value.
Here it is important, with which finger you touch a plate, because each finger corresponds to one (musical) voice.
For instance plate1 controls volume and plate2 pitch.
If you have now finger1 on plate1 and finger2 on plate2 and turn the unicorn, you will change the volume of voice1 and the pitch of voice2.

Additionally there are two buttons on the board to change between presets.

technical realization

An arduino board (an open-source physical computing platform) is used to communicate with the computer and all sound synthesis is implemented in Pure Data under Linux.