Michel Morin's Sneaky Gestures V2 Is a Feature-Packed Wearable for Turning Hand Movements Into MIDI

Maker and musician Michel Morin has released a second-generation incarnation of Sneaky Gestures, a microcontroller-powered glove which acts as a MIDI instrument — turning finger movements into music.

"The original wired Sneaky Gestures V1 was first developed in 2012 and based on the ACSensorizer/MIDIbox platform," Morin explains of the first-generation wearable. "I performed live on tour with V1 for a year for my Sneak-Thief project. V2 replicates most of the features of V1, with the obvious addition of BLE [Bluetooth Low Energy], LEDs, 12 notes instead of eight, and modal controls directly on the glove. V2 will be used live for my post-industrial/EBM project, INVOLUCIJA."

The wearable instrument is powered by a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 Sense microcontroller board, which is in turn built around the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 wireless microcontroller. The microcontroller's Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio is used to communicate with a host machine, acting as a BLE MIDI controller — meaning it's software-agnostic, and can be used with any MIDI-capable synth, digital audio workstation, or the like.

Control is handled through gestures, performed using conductive pads on the fingers and thumbs: pinch your thumb to one of the matching pads on the fingers and you'll play a note. A flex sensor located in the index finger acts as a pitch-bend control, while a force-sensitive resistor (FSR) in the thumb provides after-touch — and the Seeed XIAO nRF58240 Sense's integrated accelerometer provides a continuous data stream over two MIDI CCs for additional control, tracking X and Y axis changes respectively.

That's already a fairly impressive array of capabilities, but Morin isn't done there. The glove includes 20 scales that can be selected live, with visual feedback via RGB LEDs on the knuckles. There's support for tap tempo with key/root transposition, beats-per-minute (BPM) nudging, CC swap, and a flex-range editor, the pitch bending tracks tempo with automatic retuning to the host's clock, and you can save up to 63 presets to on-board flash memory.

"The [LED] strip is the only on-device feedback," Morin notes. "Each mode repaints it with a distinct meaning — notes ripple outward from the played knuckle, the flex bar fills as the finger bends, octave/spread/scale flash brief indicators, and the tap-tempo and preset-browser modes each host several sub-views with their own LED layouts. Presets can be backed up and restored over the USB serial monitor (115200 baud), independent of any BLE host."

Full details, along with the project source code under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3, are available on GitHub.