McMaster teams finish 3rd and 8th at YHacks

 

A couple weeks ago I posted a story about a group of McMaster students participating in YHacks. It turns out several teams from McMaster made the trip, and two of them placed 3rd and 8th. Incredible!

Check out the details and videos of what they produced below:

 

Virtual Theremin Machine (VTM) – 3rd place

“We originally wanted to make a piano but the Kinect didn’t offer precise finger tracking services so we decided to adapt a more feasible instrument such as the Theremin. The Theremin offers a novel taste to our hack because it is a unique instrument and doesn’t require precise fingering.” [link]

 

 

Maestro – 8th place

“Maestro puts you in control of your own orchestra. Using your arm’s movements, you control a variety of instruments in a grand orchestral piece. Depending on the direction of your arm’s movements, a different note is played. All of this information is gathered using Thalmic Lab’s Myo armband. As you compose, you are able to switch instruments between a strings section, horns section, and the vocal section of the orchestra.

Each section has a range of 24 notes, played in the key of C. Due to a carefully crafted musical algorithm, everything you play sounds good- it is impossible to play a discordant note. In addition to the code, all of the sound involved in Maestro was recorded during YHack using Apple’s Logic Pro.

Maestro was written in C++ in Microsoft Visual Studio. To connect with the Myo, we used the Myo SDK developed by Thalmic Labs. The SFML library is used to control everything in the background.” [link]