Kuturani: a low-cost device to augment acoustic string instruments

Abstract

The concept of hyperinstruments emerged around forty years ago with various approaches to instrumental augmentation, such as Tod Machover’s Hypercello (Machover; Chung, 1989)  and Andrew McPherson’s magnetic resonator piano (McPherson; Kim, 2010). These instruments are typically designed by experts utilizing advanced and often expensive technologies, with unique designs tailored to each instrument. Aiming to democratize the field of augmented instrument design, we developed Kuturani, a cost-effective instrument augmentation system. Our aim is to support communities with limited resources by emphasizing the use of locally-crafted musical instruments. Our concept is to develop a device that can be adapted to work on any string instrument and keep its design open to anyone who wishes to replicate or modify it. To achieve this goal, we have designed multiple versions of the device, each one offering different options that can be tailored to the user's needs. In the process of developing the Kuturani, we faced multiple problems, such as the difficulty of maintaining all of the characteristics of our design while working with different technical approaches and components. In this paper, we report the progress of our project and the strengths and weaknesses of working with four different microcontrollers to produce our device, as well as our approach dealing with data acquisition, feedback and signal processing, all while trying to keep the cost of the variations of the device as low as possible.