ESITAR

The Electronic Sitar (ESitar) is a new instrument combining the traditional craft of India with new hardware and software that enables a performer to natively interface with a laptop.

The Electronic Sitar (ESitar) is a hyperinstrument combining the traditional craft of India with hardware and software that enables a performer to natively interface with a laptop. The ESitar uses variety of custom sensors positioned for traditional Sitar technique, converting human musical gestures to MIDI/OSC which KarmetiK software processes in real time. With the goal of capturing a wide variety of gestural input data, the ESitar controller combines several different families of sensing technology and signal processing methods. The specific gestures our system captures data from are the depressed fret number, thumb pressure, pluck direction, and 3 axes of the tilt of the instrument. The instrument comes with a variety of knobs and buttons for digital control.