Research in the NIME and ICMA archives

M&T2 Blog Post Assignment 1

In my Music and Tech class I was assigned to look through the NIME and ICMA archives and find three interesting papers, then describe the most interesting. This is that blog post.

The Three Papers:

• The Sparksichord: Practical Implementation of a Lorentz Force Electromagnetic Actuation and Feedback System
• Hacking Sound, Hacking History: Patricia Cadavid and the Electronic_Khipu_
• Live Improvisation with Fine-Tuned Generative AI: A Musical Metacreation Approach

This paper describes a musical instrument called the Sparksichord, a modified harpsichord whose strings can vibrate indefinitely using electromagnetics instead of being plucked repeatedly. The vibration is caused by running a current through the string to create a force on the string due to the Lorenz Force. When developing the Sparksichord they ran into issues tuning issues. When current goes through a string the electrical resistance of the string causes some of the energy to be released as heat into the string which expands the string which causes the Sparksichord to go out of tune. This is a really funny problem to have. They prevented this by using brass strings which have much lower resistance compared to steel and by lowering the current and increasing the magnetic field to compensate.