Monkeys & Synths

We like to mix it up @ the blog of choice and found the article below:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/05/synths-versus-real-primates-so-easy-a-monkey-can-play-it/#more-24069


Composer and Swedish dance music maestro Håkan Libdo has been a constant source of experimentation. But his latest project yields zoo-like new adventurousness. Six species of monkeys are equipped with synthesizers to test the question of whether playing a synth is really playing music – or if it’s so simple, a monkey can do it. 


Describing the project, there’s a bit of a defense of the complexity of the instrument:


“You just press a button and out comes music, right?” Well… you do press buttons, twist knobs and faders, but there are endless ways of doing this. That is why the synthesizer is one of the greatest example of human ingenuity and engineering — something that makes us different from the monkeys.


You obviously can’t just break into the monkey cage with some finds from eBay and try this yourself. Lest you think there was some animal cruelty involved, Skansen Aquarium in Stockholm was a collaborator in the film. Here’s a look at what happens – the Bliptronic is to me the clear winner as a monkey-playable instrument, and in the end, some keyboards just … lose.





It’s all a teaser – and a clever one – for Sweden’s Voltfestivalen, coming up June 9. Edited by Simon Carlgren, concept by Håkan Lidbo. Of course, this doesn’t answer whether monkeys can be DJs… or Paris Hilton, for that matter. (She announced her debut DJ set date today and was, perhaps, met with more skepticism than these adorable zoo animals.) 

Just One Contact Mic, Turns Any Surface into a Gestural Instrument

Look around the room you’re in. Drum your fingers against some of the objects around you. Now imagine that you could turn those touches into any imaginable sound – and all you’d need to play them is a single contact mic. And we’re not talking just simplistic sounds – think expressive, responsive transformation of the world around you, all with just that one mic, thanks to clever gestural recognition.

Bruno Zamborlin has made that idea a reality, with hold-onto-your-chair results. It’s not available yet for public consumption, but it’s coming.

Bruno explains to CDM:

Mogees is a novel way for transforming any surface into a musical instrument.

By putting a (very cheap) contact microphone over a surface, the software can recognise different types of touch and associate them with different synthesisers.

Users can train the software with their own ‘gestures’, using both bare hands and objects. In the video demo we put the microphone over different surfaces such as kitchen tables and balloons.

The sound synthesis is based on two different techniques:

1 – physical modeling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws. Different materials can be simulated, such as membranes, strings, tubes and plates

2 – mosaicing, that works as follow: first, users load a sound folder; then, the noise coming from the microphone is analysed and the software continuously finds and plays its closest segment within the sound folder.

Mogees has not been realised yet. It could be published as Max4Live patch in some month.

Yes, we’ll be watching for future versions and publication, with bated breath and eager hands.

http://www.brunozamborlin.com/mogees

Update: Readers point to similar earlier work; obviously, contact mics have long been readily available. I’m not always concerned with whether something is new or not – old and cool can be cool. But what does appear to be new here is the additional gestural analysis to work more accurately with location. That takes an existing technique and refines its musicality. -PK

BY PETER KIRN


Originally posted
  With Just One Contact Mic, Any Surface Magically Becomes a Gestural Instrument    

Onyx Ashanti - Beatboxing/BeatJazz

Watch this short to get an idea of how it's done.....





Now watch this and be amazed........