Electric Stimulus To Face
Daito Manabe uses small electrical pulses to stimulate his facial muscles.
Actively Controlled Acoustic Instruments
A definition for ‘active controlled acosutic instruments’ can be found in the paper by Edgar Berdahl, Hans-Christoph Steiner, and Collin Oldham for NIME2008 called ‘Practical Hardware and Algorithms for Creating Haptic Musical Instruments [pdf]‘.
An actively controlled acoustic musical instrument is an acoustic musical instrument that is augmented with sensors, actuators, and a controller. These instruments can be considered a special case of haptic musical instruments where the interface is the entire acoustic instrument itself. For
example, a monochord string can be plucked and bowed at various positions as usual, while its acoustic behavior is governed by the control hardware. Simple and appropriate control algorithms emulate passive networks of masses, springs, and dampers or implement self-sustaining oscillators.
The paper looks at two examples the Haptic Drum by Edgar Berdahl and the Cellomobo by Collin Oldham.
The Haptic Drum uses haptic feedback to control the mvoement of a drum stick. It can produce high speed accurate drum rolls using just one hand so you can use your other hand to play something extra!
The Cellomobo produces feedback as a user bows a virtual string. Both of the instruments are described in more detail in the paper.
Sormina
Sormina is a musical instrument developed by Juhani Räisänen.
The aim of my project is to gain knowledge about instruments and their impact in the western classical music. My point is that the material quality of acoustical instruments has had a major effect in the development of music
Sound is created by noise generators and the instrument is used to shape the sound via eight potentiometers controlled by the fingers. The sensory data is then passed to a computer via bluetooth. Each potentiometer controls a different sound parameter, such as attack, delay, gain and effrect parameters.
DIMI Synthesizers
The DIMI synthesizers were designed by Finnish electronic music pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi in 1970. He created a number of early electronic instruments using original control methods. The DIMI-A was the first in the range standing for ‘Digital Music Instrument - Associative Memory’ essentially an early sampler. The DIMI-O or ‘Optical Organ’ displayed the musical notes via a screen and also had a video camera that could be used to convert movements into sound. The Dimi-S or ‘Sexophone’ was an instrument used by four players each wearing handcuffs and wires. Musical tones were generated as the players touched each other. The electrical resistance between the players was measured and ‘with increasing skin moisture and contact area, the intensity of the music increased’!
The Dimi-T or ‘Electroencephalophone‘ measured the EEG signals from the user’s earlobes. The signal was ‘amplified, band-pass filtered and used to frequency modulate a voltage-controlled oscillator’.
The original idea was to build four of these instruments, and let the musicians to go to sleep while hearing each other’s generated sounds. During sleep there appears in the EEG slow high-amplitude delta waves, and short duration ’sleep spindles’. Would the brain waves of the sleeping players get synchronized? This test was never made.
The last in the seires was the Dimi-6000, an analog voltage controlled synthesizer using an Intel 8008 microproccessor. An article written by Kurenniemi ‘History of Dimi Instruments‘ which came out with a DVD called ‘The Dawn of DIMI‘. Although there are some short video demonstrations online.
Musical Rumba Table
Musical Furnishings has released a customisable musical table. The table is made up of modules which you can swap around to create a unique playing surface. Check out the old musical furnishing’s website which has more with examples.
The Vegetable Orchestra
The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions or tirelessly re-stewed listening habits, putting its focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens.
Shape of Things That Hum
Eight part series made by Jacques Peretti from 2001, looking at cult electronic instruments and how they have influenced modern music.
Here are the links to each episode:
[1 - AKAI]
[2 - TR808]
[3 - TB303]
[4 - Simmons Drums]
[5 - Fairlight]
[6 - DX7]
[7 - Vocoder]
[8 - MiniMoog]
Found via post at kvr.
Reactable
Reactable is a tabletop tangible user interface allowing several performers to control the instrument simultaneously. By moving physical objects on the table surface, users can interact with one another (locally or remotely). Researched and developed by the “Interactive Sonic Systems” team at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona Spain.
A video camera beneath the translucent table tracks the position and relationship between the objects and instant visual feedback is displayed by a projector.
Freqtric Drums
Freqtric Drums is a drum machine enabling a performer to interact directly with the audience. Both the performer and the audience drums wear rings connecting them to an interface. Skin contact is detected using Electro Dermal Activity (EDA) and human skin resistance, which are used in Polygraphs. The drum sounds are triggered by the drummer touching an audience members hand (or even nose or forehead). It’s MIDI enabled to allow any drum sounds to be used. There are more videos here [1] [2]
Audiopad
Developed by James Patten and Ben Recht, the audiopad tracks the position of objects on a tabletop and converts the movement into sound. The display provides visual feedback for the performer and the audience. The system is based on an earlier device made by James Patten called SenseTable.
Drum Buddy
Drum Buddy is a rhythm machine created by New Orleans based drummer Mr Quintronics using photo-electric resistors. A limited number were built at the end of 1999 and are as such very rare! There are sound samples on the site you should check out
The only difference with the DRUM BUDDY is that the rules are all new and not based on any preordained music system, but on color coded switches, pipes, knobs, and your own sense of rhythm - not a single number, letter or word to restrict your playing.
Since posting this on the forum there is now a cool Drum Buddy demo on youtube, after new Drum Buddy instruments were made in 2007.
