When a diving accident paralyzed musician Mike Hamer from the neck down in 1985, he doubted he would ever play the electric bass guitar again. Instead, he took up one of the few instruments he could play-the hammered dulcimer, a stringed instrument which produces a more folksy sound.
But through a class project, biomedical engineering seniors Lindsay Johnson and Corey Weiner presented Hamer with a device they had built to simulate guitar sounds.
"This allows me to use the same motion that I use on the hammered dulcimer but to make a bass sound," said Hamer, who currently plays in three different bands and plans to release a folk CD next month. "I will be able to do bass riffs on here."
Johnson and Weiner constructed the device in a fall semester class titled "Devices for the Disabled." Biomedical engineering Assistant Research Professor Laurence Bohs conceived the idea for the device about eight years ago when he met Hamer at a concert.
"I was telling him about how much I missed playing the bass, " Hamer said. "I said it would be cool to figure out how to play a bass with a wrist motion."
Hamer was able to play Johnson and Weiner's device, the "hammered bass guitar," using the same thin, curved sticks that he uses to play the dulcimer. The device consists of a long, black box with many touchpads connected to a keyboard synthesizer. When Hamer hits each touchpad, the appropriate bass guitar note emanates from the synthesizer. The keyboard can also be adjusted to produce different sounds, such as the snare drum.
Hamer had previously been able to play an electronic keyboard by thumping the keys with erasers, but was unable to get the precision or speed that he can with the new device.
For Weiner and Johnson, giving Hamer the device was the culmination of many, many hours of work. The two traveled to Chapel Hill early last semester to hear Hamer play, and had him tap on their palms to get a sense of how hard he would hit the touchpads.
"We spent a whole semester on this project," Weiner said. "We pulled three all-nighters. All my spare time went into this project."
When Hamer tried out the device for the first time, there were slight adjustments that needed to be made. But for Weiner, those adjustments are part of the sense of accomplishment.
"It's not something that has to work only once during the presentation and then we throw away," Weiner said. "It's something that will be used, hopefully, for a long time."
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