Mi.Mu gloves for Music beats!

Grammy-winning British artist Imogen Heap says she's always been a bit frustrated by not being able to navigate computers and mixing boards with the same fluidity other musicians can play more traditional instruments. To solve this, she's "joined forces with the nerd underworld, creating musical gloves using new sensor technology allowing me to compose and perform music with computers in an intuitive way."


The first report on the gloves is back in 2011 when Heap debuted them at a TED conference. Now, the artist and her team of engineers and scientists are seeking funding for their "Mi.Mu gloves" through a Kickstarter campaign seeking to raise £200,000 (about $330,000 USD) to bring the technology to the masses.

Ice cream that plays music when licked!

Playing with your food is generally frowned upon, but very little is said about playing music with your food. Artists Emilie Baltz and Carla Diana are exploring exactly that concept. Together with the musician Arone Dyer of Buke&Gase.

Their work Lickestra is a musical performance in which ice cream is used as the instrument. It uses cones with embedded capacitive sensors. The ice cream sits within the cones and, when licked, causes the sensors to send an electronic signal to an attached Arduino board. The Arduino, in turn, feeds a computer on which a library of melody loops and beats is stored, and that controls the subsequent audio output.

Playing with the experience from tongue to taste, the performance presents a series of conductive ice creams that trigger various baselines and tones when licked.

From improvisation to orchestration, eater becomes performer as the primitive act of licking reaches beyond flavor perception to become an instrument for play.

Lickestra lasts until all the ice cream is licked!

Digit-al Music...intuitive gloves to make music

Now that's digit-al music: 'Intuitive' gloves allow wearer to make noises using hand gestures

Engineering students at Cornell University, New York, made the gloves that use a magnetic tracking system and can create virtually any sound

The Aura enables wearers to make music using expressive and intuitive hand gestures so that music lessons are not required.Raising and lowering gloved hands controls pitch and spreading them apart increases volume. 

By closing the fingers, the Aura wearer activates flex sensors and muffles the sound, while twisting the hands adds distortion that makes the noises produced sound extra futuristic. 

Through an interface created by Mr Ndubuisi, hand positions are converted to signals in the universal Midi language for electronic instruments and fed to a synthesiser.

The future is now!

Sebastian...ear training software for music teachers...

Last week, Crosmer unveiled his solution to ear training, called Sebastian. It's named after Sebastian Bach, a well-trained ear himself.

The desktop program, available for Mac, PC and Linux, uses an on-screen keyboard and walks users through a series of exercises in which Sebastian plays two notes. The program gives students a visual depiction of where the first note is on the keyboard and then they must guess where the second note is.  The difficulty continues to increase as it goes from single notes to chords to scales. The program also identifies areas where students are struggling and repeats those exercises while weeding out ones they ace.

Ototo - Music form everything

Ototo is an all-in-one musical invention kit which allows you to make an instrument any way you want. Ototo is now available on Kickstarter. Created by Yuri Suzuki and Mark McKeague experts in product design, interaction design, music and technology.

Dentaku - Ototo from Broadway on Vimeo.

The art of asking...

Don't make people pay for music, says Amanda Palmer: Let them. In a passionate talk that begins in her days as a street performer (drop a dollar in the hat for the Eight-Foot Bride!), she examines the new relationship between artist and fan.