You might have heard about Imogen Heap's performance on the TED Global Stage earlier this month (and later at the FUTURE OF MUSIC I believe). She demonstrated a new way of creating music using a pair of specially designed gloves and generated music based only on the movements of her hands and her body.
More details from MASHABLE:
The performance was more than two and a half years in the making, the culmination of a project that Heap first became interested in after seeing the beginnings of such technology at MIT. In an interview with Mashable afterwards, Heap told me she wanted to use body movement to create music so she could “communicate the hidden 50% of the performance.”
Those movements include, for example, the ability to record a loop by opening her hand, filtering sound by bringing her hands together and panning by pointing in the desired direction. Volume can also be manipulated with some fitting gestures — a “shh” movement initiates quiet mode and a horn sign prompts “rock out mode.” The sensors that Heap’s gloves are equipped with send the movement data back to a computer that then blends it all together to create a relatively robust piece of music in real-time.
There might be plans to make these one-of-a-kind musical gloves to the market but we'l have to wait and see (I will stick to my Gibson for the time being). And Imogen is also being interviewed in the latest podcast of WIRED UK here.
