Jeffrey Nils Gardner

Audio Producer/Director/Artist

THe UNwell Suitcase

Suitcase Open.jpg

The Unwell Suitcase is a NIME (New Instrument for Musical Expression) designed to accompany live shows for the podcast Unwell, a Midwestern Gothic Mystery.

Built into a small brown suitcase, this device controls a Max MSP patch which in turn controls a set of soundscapes. These soundscapes can be time stretched, pitch adjusted, and volume controlled using a series of potentiometers, and restarted and glitched using buttons.

The suitcase is built around an Arduino Uno with a multiplexer to handle an expanded number of analog inputs. Each of the upper blocks controls a single soundscape. The leftmost potentiometer of each block controls volume, while the middle controls pitch stretching, and the rightmost controls timestretching. The green button starts and stops the soundscape, while the red button immediately restarts the soundscape from the beginning.

The softpot pictured to the left is currently decorative, and will be replaced with two more sets of sounscape surfaces.

The bottom right potentiometer currently controls the volume of a third soundscape built into the Max MSP patch, and will eventually control the overall volume of the instrument.

My main struggles during the creation process involved the multiplexer- which required comparatively advanced coding on both the arduino and Max MSP sides. I particularly had difficulty getting the softpot to cooperate with the Multiplexer.

In the next itteration of this project, I plan to replace the softpot with at least two more sets of soundscape controls- relying on other instruments and actors to provide the “soloing” functionality.

I also plan to replace the balsawood and cardboard structures with more permanent and durable materials, hopefully making the instrument significantly hardier.

Max MSP Patch Code:

<pre><code>

----------begin_max5_patcher----------

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-----------end_max5_patcher-----------

</code></pre>