The T-Stick Digital Musical Instrument

The T-Stick is a DMI conceived by Joseph Malloch and D. Andrew Stewart at the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL) at McGill University. It has been in development since 2006, has a relatively long history for a DMI, has multiple versions, several expert performers, and has an associated repertoire. More than 20 copies have been built unintended for commercial use. Nevertheless, it has been adopted by expert performers and composers as part of their musical practice including D. Andrew Stewart (Soprano user) and Fernando Rocha (Tenor user). It has appeared in dozens of public appearances in countries such as Canada, USA, Brazil, Italy, Norway, and Portugal.

This video from Joe Malloch, D. Andrew Stewart and Fernando Rocha explains the concept of the T-Stick and our motivations for designing it.

In October 2022, the former and current members of IDMIL met for a hybrid meeting to discuss the T-Stick. This involved discussing what we wanted from a new design, interesting ideas that we wanted to explore and ongoing issues or bugs that need to be resolved. From this meeting three goals were established for the new iteration of the T-Stick:

1. Better sensor resolution and speed
2. Improved reliability/robustness
3. Improved maintainability

Prototype Board ordered from PCBWay, using a TinyPico Board and Trill Craft Board

As part of this redesign, the electronics of the T-Stick have been re-engineered. This has involved designing a custom microcontroller board with an ESP32 MCU and other sensors integrated onto the board, as well as integrating a flexible PCB with a touch sensor.  

ESP32 WROOM 2 Board

This board contains an ESP32 module for wifi communication and sensor processing. It also includes a fuel gauge for accurate battery life estimation and a magnetic inertial measurement unit (MIMU) for orientation measurements

Touch Board

This board has headers to solder a Trill Craft board from Bela and a molex connector to connector to a flexible PCB for 30 channels of touch sensing.

This project would benefit from the support of PCBWay. As a university research lab we have a limited budget for sourcing and manufacturing parts. PCBWay’s support would enable us to quickly prototype different ideas and gain design experience. This experience would not only benefit the T-Stick project but other projects within the lab such as Probatio, an open source toolkit for prototyping new digital musical instruments and the Torquetuner an embedded haptic module for experimenting with force feedback for musical applications.