Description:
The Agbau is a DMI (Digital Musical Instrument) designed through a participatory process at the Xambá quilombola community in Pernambuco, Brazil. A second-generation Agbau, in three copies, was constructed at IDMIL by João Tragtenberg, Giordano Gatti, and Marcelo Wanderley.
Agbau’s name derives from combining the names of two Brazilian percussion instruments: the Agbê and the Berimbau. Its form comes from a cut-in-half cabaça, or gourd. It features eight large buttons on the right hand for percussion samples, and eight smaller ones on the left hand for berimbau samples, in a layout inspired by the oito-baixos accordion.
The new generation of Agbaus runs on Bela software on an Arduino board and has its own speakers powered by power banks. They also have a looper and a beat-repeat function.
This current Agbau performance project is led by percussionists/improvisers Tarcísio Braga and Martin Daigle.
IDMIL Participants:
External Participants:
Video: Martin&Tarcisio_AgbauDemo_CIRMMT
with Martin Daigle
Research Areas:
Funding:
- NSERC
Publications:
- Tragtenberg, J., Calegario, F., Wanderley, M. M., Cavalcanti, V. (2024). Designing DMIs with(in) a Music Culture: A Participatory Design Process with the Xambá Quilombola Community. In Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME2024). Utrecht, NL.