Digital Terpsitone

The terpsitone is one of the earliest non-contact musical instruments ever created — roughly 50 years before touchscreens existed. Players produce music entirely through body movements, without touching anything. Over time, the instrument faded into obscurity due to its difficulty and the lack of accessible learning materials.

Working with Prof. Alexei Sourin at NTU, I built a digital revival using the Microsoft Kinect sensor to track full-body skeletal data and map it to musical output in real time via a C# application.

Key features of the system:

• Non-contact control: pitch and volume are modulated by the positions and velocities of the player's hands relative to their body.
• Guided mode: an in-built song follower highlights the correct movements, lowering the learning curve significantly.
• Multi-player support: multiple Kinect feeds can be combined, allowing ensemble performance on a single instrument.

This research was published and presented as part of the NTU Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) programme.