StringPort

  • Dates:
  • Location: Berkeley, CA
  • Role: Software Director, Lead Developer
  • Collaborators:
    • Keith McMillen – Founder / President Keith McMillen Instruments, Hardware and Creative Director
    • Nick Bonardi – User Interface Design, Programmer
    • Don Buchla – Hardware Advisor
    • Chuck Carlson – Programmer
    • Justin Catalana – Electronics
    • Joel Davel – Electronics
    • David Hishinuma – Electronics
    • Sarah Howe – Tester, Documentation
    • Marielle Jakobsons – Creative Advisor
    • Conner Lacy – Programmer
    • Dan Maloney – Assembly, Electronics
    • Danishta Rivero – Tester, Documentation
    • Denis Saputelli – Electronics
    • Mike Zawitkowski – Business
StringPort 1
StringPort 2
StringPort 3
StringPort 4

The StringPort is the world’s first computer platform for guitar, violin, viola, cello and bass. It allows you to control software in a personal computer using your instrument as the interface. It is a hardware device that processes, converts and conveys to the computer the polyphonic audio from industry-standard hexaphonic pickups (such as GK, Graph Tek, Zeta and RMC models) through high speed USB2. The software suite includes 24 applications including fast and accurate Analysis (for converting every little performance nuance into control data), powerful Polyphonic FX Processing (Wave Guide, PolyFuzz, Phase Vocoder, SMACK), a versatile VST FX Wall (for integrating 3rd Party VST Plug- Ins), Synthesis (Classic FM and direct support for the Synful synthesizer), a Notation application (to capture data for output to music notation software), and MIDI Out to integrate StringPort into an existing MIDI set-up.

The software suite includes an analysis system that looks at the incoming audio from each string to provide a full set of spectral metadata. While other devices simply output MIDI (a single pitch and “velocity” and sometimes pitch bend), the information provided by the StringPort analysis is much richer. It contains continuous pitch and loudness, pitch bend, centroid, parity, noisiness, and inharmonicity for each string. These spectral parameters are gained from complex FFT analysis to describe the continuous vibrations of the string, not a single event.