Mahasiswa UGM Kembangkan Gamelan Untuk Tuna Netra
Mahasiswa UGM Kembangkan Gamelan Untuk Tuna Netra
Five students of UGM have developed gamelan musical instrument to help the blind people. The gamelan named as E-Gamatuna can help the blind play the gamelan easily.
The students are Fadil Fajeri (Electrical Engineering), Dinar Sakti Candra Ningrum (Electronics and Instrumentation), Muhammad Ali Irham (Electronics and Instrumentation), Sapnah Rahmawati (Applied Economics), and Musfira Muslihat (Psychology), who developed the gamelan under the supervision of Ma’un Budiyanto, S.T., M.T. , in the Student Creativity for Creation Programme UGM 2017.
Chairman of E-Gamatuna team, Fadil, said the E-Gamatuna served as the media to increase the existence of gamelan among society, including the disabled people such as the blind. It is expected to enable them in playing the gamelan.
“It needs extra learning for the blind to play gamelan, but the E-Gamatuna can help minimise the difficulties to learn and play the gamelan more practically for the blind,” he said on Monday (5/6) to reporters in the Fortakgama UGM room.
Fadil said the E-Gamatuna comprised two main parts, which are hardware and software. It is equipped with finger touch sensor made from alumunium foil for convenience.
“There is the finger touch sensor which when touched on the grounding will send the data to a microcomputer and the processed data is sent to the software as a tune,” he explained.
The tune sensors are installed on seven fingers, which are 4 of the left fingers and 3 right fingers. These can produce tunes of kepatihan notation. Kepatihan notation is the numerical notes in Javanese language, which is ji, ro, lu, pat, mo, nem, pi (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).
Sapnah added currently the E-Gamatuna is still a prototype designed on the saron instrument, but in the future they will develop it into other instruments, such as demung and peking.
The development of this instrument will not only help the blind play the music, but also expand the bid to promote Indonesian traditional culture.
“With the E-gamatuna, it is expected that the blind people can contribute to promoting Indonesian culture,” he said.