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!