The WaveSaw
Luke Dahl, Nathan Whetsell, John Van Dover Stoecker · 2007
In this paper, we describe a musical controller -- the WaveSaw - for directly manipulating a wavetable. The WaveSaw consists of a long, flexible metal strip with handles on either end, somewhat analogous to a saw. The user plays the WaveSaw by holding the handles and bending the metal strip. We use sensors to measure the strip's curvature and reconstruct its shape as a wavetable stored in a computer. This provides a direct gestural mapping from the shape of the WaveSaw to the timbral characteristics of the computer-generated sound. Additional sensors provide control of pitch, amplitude, and other musical parameters.