The Vodhran DMI by Mark Marshall et al

Three articles describing The Vodhran are available towards the bottom of Mark Marshall's publications page:

Controlling the Virtual Bodhran - the Vodran - R. Bresin, S. Dahl, M. Marshall, M. Rath and B. Moynihan

The Virtual Bodhran - Design and Development of a Virtual Musical Instrument - M. Marshall, B. Moynihan and M. Rath

The Virtual Bodhran - The Vodhran - M. Marshall, B. Moynihan and M. Rath

I include these articles here because I thought the Vodhran may be conceptually similar to my Cajon DMI but on reading the articles its possible that they're not so similar, however they're still examples of an interesting DMI. The most usual article seems to be the first one, which gives the most concrete description of the various applications of the Vodhran from the software to the controller.

One application of the Vodhran uses Max Mathew's radio baton to measure the distance and position of the each end of the beater from the antenna. Another uses a gesture tracking system to extract details about the player's gestures such as velocity and acceleration. The application conceptually closest to the ideas I have at the moment seems to be the one involving the ddrum (a MIDI drum-pad with velocity sensitivity and aftertouch parameters):

" In addition to the control devices described above, the ddrum [6]
was used to play the sound model of the Bodhran (see Figure 2 A).
The ddrum is a commercial available electronic drumpad and the
MIDI velocity out from the control unit was used to excite the
sound model. For the pad used there was also MIDI poly-aftertouch,
which was used to control the dampening of the model. The ddrum
is a nice interface to play the model because of it’s tactile feedback
to the player and the lack of cables to the sticks used for playing. "

Note the advantages stated regarding the ddrum's passive tactile feedback.

These articles seem to demonstrate three main ways that I could approach handelling gestural interfacing for this project:

1. Monitor the position of the beater/s (hands, sticks) with respect to the controller itself
2. Use gesture tracking to extract indirect features of player's gestures for control (ie velocity)
3. Monitor the state of the controller itself for strikes