The Stompolin is a digital instrument I created at a Physical Interaction Design workshop at CCRMA. It is designed to allow the player to create music by involving their whole body, instead of focusing on the hands as many traditional instruments do. My goal was to accurately capture the emotional content of full-body movements, whether gentle or vigorous, and transmit it as music.
It uses a small microphone attached to the foot to detect impacts such as stomps and kicks, and uses recordings of those impulses to "pluck" several instances of a custom Karplus-Strong implementation I made in Max/MSP, via an Arduino microcontroller. Bend-sensors are attached the the finger and elbow to control instrument pitch and the cutoff frequency of a low-pass filter respectively. Additionally, if the mic captures a high-frequency impact such as the sound of a stick smacked against the floor, it'll send the signal through a custom granulator to add texture to the instrument's output.