Handvox
One of the first projects I worked on at Stanford was the handvox. I had this idea for using hand gestures to control speech synthesis so you could “talk” on a busy train. I used Stanfords Music 250A class to try this out. The result was an accelerometer-based data glove that drove
Soldering the compoents took about two days, and adapting the code on the AVR Mini took about a day or two. The AVR program sent OSCserial messages to a program running on my PC, which translated the serial port OSC into OSC over IP, which then drove a synthesis patch in PD. The results of the synthesis were ok - I could modulate volume and pitch and switch from voiced to unvoiced sounds. The data rate of the serial link was too slow with all the sensors I had and there were definite ergonomic and usability issues with the glove. A better interface would be to have an inobtrusive camera mounted somewhere.