Melody Easel Tech Specs

The Melody Easel lets players manipulate music and graphics with the touch of a finger. A touch screen interface gives control over speed, complexity and articulation of a series of samples recorded with Lorraine Hunt.

Each Melody Easel seats three people around a cafe-table-like surface. Tracing their fingers over the table-top (which has been outfitted with a touch-screen), the players can manipulate music and graphics. The touch screen interface gives control over speed, complexity and articulation of a melody. For the New York premiere of the Brain Opera, there will be three Melody Easels for the audience to play.

The 3 touch screens, donated by ELO, are installed in a 21S monitor and suspended from our set structure to form a table-top.

Raw data coming from each touch screen goes through a touch screen controller (also donated by ELO ) and into an IBM PC, which runs the system with a 133 MHz Pentium processor and 32 megabytes of RAM.

We are running Microsoft's Windows NT platform on our PC to generate MIDI based on the input.

An AWE 32 sound card donated by Creative Technology, Inc. sends MIDI to a sampler and a synth.

The K2500 synthesizer and sampler, sponsored by Kurzweil, holds the vocal samples.

A Korg Prophecy generates the synthesized audio for the Melody Easel.

The resulting music is amplified and then played through a pair of K-RoK Studio Monitors by KRK.

All cables and connectors are from Belden Wire and Cable.

(image by Tanya Bezreh)