Robotic prosthesis turns drummer into a three-armed cyborg - Video

Georgia Tech has created a robotic drumming prosthesis with motors that power two drumsticks. 

The first stick is controlled both physically by the musicians' arms and electronically using electromyography (EMG) muscle sensors. 

The other stick "listens" to the music being played and improvises. The robot that can be attached to amputees, allowing its technology to be embedded into humans.

Gil Weinberg

Professor Gil Weinberg has already built a band of robotic musicians in his Georgia Tech lab.

Now he's created a robot that can be attached to amputees, allowing its technology to be embedded into humans.

The robotic drumming prosthesis has motors that power two drumsticks. The first stick is controlled both physically by the musicians' arms and electronically using electromyography (EMG) muscle sensors.

The other stick "listens" to the music being played and improvises.

"The second drumstick has a mind of its own," said Weinberg, founding director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology.

"The drummer essentially becomes a cyborg. It's interesting to see him playing and improvising with part of his arm that he doesn't totally control."

The prosthesis was created for Jason Barnes, a drummer who was electrocuted two years ago and lost his right arm below the elbow.

The Atlanta Institute of Music and Media (AIMM) student built his own prosthetic device shortly after the accident. It wasn't very flexible.

He could bang the drums by moving his elbow up and down, but couldn't control the speed or bounce of the stick without a wrist or fingers.

That's when Weinberg stepped in to create a single-stick device with sensors that responds to Barnes' bicep muscles.

"Now I can flex and send signals to a computer that tightens or loosens the stick and controls the rebound," said Barnes.

Weinberg, who has already built a robotic percussionist and marimba player that use computer algorithms to improvise with human musicians, took the prosthesis a step further. He added the second stick and gave it a "musical brain."

"Jason can pull the robotic stick away from the drum when he wants to be fully in control," says Weinberg. "Or he can allow it to play on its own and be surprised and inspired by his own arm responding to his drumming."

Scottish Cybraphon Sings - Video

Cybraphon Demo Song (The Balkan Bazaar) from Cybraphon on Vimeo.


Cybraphon is the latest project from Edinburgh-based artist collective FOUND (Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby and Tommy Perman).

Inspired by early 19th century mechanical bands such as the nickelodeon, Cybraphon is an interactive version of a mechanical band in a box. Consisting of a series of robotic instruments housed in a large display case, Cybraphon behaves like a real band.

Image conscious and emotional, the band’s performance is affected by online community opinion as it searches the web for reviews and comments about itself 24 hours a day.

This website documents the progress of the project as Cybraphon is comes to life at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (ESW).

Cybraphon is funded by the Alt-w Production Award administered by New Media Scotland and will be unveiled at the Edinburgh Arts Festival on 5 August 2009 in InSpace Gallery.

David Byrne and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin discuss Science and Music

David Byrne and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music, discuss the inner workings of music. Byrne’s new book, How Music Works, is an absolute must-read.

The conversation is part of SEED magazine’s Science Is Culture series, pairing artists and scientists to explore the intersection of science and society.

SETI and Three Piatcions: As Seen Through a Telescope

This is an interesting music video for Italian shoegaze band “Thee Piatcions“. Their Wall-Of-Sound, psychedelic music (they must be one of the loudest bands touring Europe) inspired us to create this sort of retro sci-fi comedy about searching for life in space and looking for love on Earth.

The Airpiano 3D: Playing the piano in the air!

Credit to www.airpiano.de

The airpiano is an innovative MIDI and OSC controller. It allows the user to trigger invisible keys and faders in midair.

Touch-Free Interface

The airpiano is the first musical interface to introduce an intuitive and simple touch-free interaction. Most touch-free interfaces require users to stare at a display.

The user’s hand gestures in 3D space control elements on the screen. However, musicians and performers need to be able to play their instruments in a more free and intuitive way.

The airpiano’s keys and faders are therefore not on the screen, but above the airpiano surface. The performer knows the position of each controller in the air, so no display is needed, and the interaction becomes much more natural.

Discrete and Continuous Control

The airpiano is often compared with the Theremin. The Theremin is a wonderful instrument which is quite difficult to play. One reason for this is that it provides only continuous control.

The airpiano has a matrix of 24 discrete keys and 8 faders, which makes it much more simple to use.

Actually, the airpiano software makes the device so versatile that there is no real reason for a comparison.

These are completely different instruments.

Check out the airpiano features. User Experience Some people ask: why not just use a box with lots of buttons and shiny LEDs? What can I do with an airpiano that I can’t do with other controllers?

Well, we love all kinds of musical interfaces, and there are many wonderful and innovative alternative controllers out there.

However, we strongly believe that the airpiano introduces a new user experience, a magical and cool performance tool and an experimental instrument to explore.

The airpiano software allows setting the device in numerous ways and since there are no “rules” of how to play an airpiano, new creative ideas and playing techniques will come to life!

Can Playing Maternal Voice and Heartbeat Sounds Benefit Premies?

Nearly five years ago, Amir Lahav became a parent of twins born prematurely at 25 weeks. They weighed just over 1 pound each.

Welcoming two newborns into the family certainly changed his life, but as a neuroscientist, it also ended up changing the course of his research.

Lahav studies how the brain processes sounds, and worked primarily with neurologically impaired adults, but with the birth of his twins, his paternal instinct kicked in.

He approached the chief of newborn medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where the babies lay in incubators.

“Could I put a recording of my wife's voice in there?” Lahav asked, convinced that hearing their mother’s soothing tones would improve the babies’ development. The answer: It's certainly worthwhile.

Using his computer, Lahav recorded his wife’s voice telling the babies they’re fighters and urging them to be strong.

He also included some soothing piano music, figuring it could prove relaxing for preemies. Then he tinkered with the sound to make it resemble what a baby would hear in utero.

While we hear through air, babies in the womb process sound through fluid so what passes as hearing consists of more low-frequency vibrations. (Think about slipping beneath the surface of the bath as someone talks to you, or try speaking while putting a finger in each ear.) “It’s as if babies are living in a micro-subwoofer,” explains Lahav.

The twins seemed to like the recordings, and doctors and nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) were intrigued.

Moreover, it proved therapeutic for Lahav and his wife. “It was not a controlled trial,” says Lahav, “but just a crazy father trying to do something because especially in the case of premature babies, you feel very helpless.”

Once his twins left the hospital, Lahav returned to thank the chief for letting him experiment.

One thing led to another, and they found themselves in a serious conversation about prematurity and how the focus of neonatal medicine has changed from saving the lives of these babies, doctors have grown expert at keeping preemies alive, to helping them grow into healthy children.

Studies have shown that premature infants are at greater risk of having low IQ and developing metabolic or chronic conditions in young adulthood that can shorten their lives.

Could keeping them bathed in mom’s comforting sounds lower the incidence of some of these adverse effects on their health? Lahav wound up with a job offer to find out.

Read more: Can Playing Maternal Voice and Heartbeat Sounds Benefit Premies?

Martin Klimas Painting With Sound - Slide Show

Like a 3-D take on Jackson Pollock, the latest work by the artist Martin Klimas begins with splatters of paint in fuchsia, teal and lime green, positioned on a scrim over the diaphragm of a speaker.

Then the volume is turned up. For each image, Klimas selects music — typically something dynamic and percussive, like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Miles Davis or Kraftwerk — and the vibration of the speaker sends the paint aloft in patterns that reveal themselves through the lens of his Hasselblad.

Klimas rose to prominence in the art world four years ago for a series of photos that captured porcelain figurines just as they shattered.

For this series, Klimas spent six months and about 1,000 shots to produce the final images from his studio in Düsseldorf, Germany.

In addition to the obvious debt owed to abstract expressionism, Klimas says his major influence was Hans Jenny, the father of cymatics, the study of wave phenomena.

The resulting images are Klimas’s attempt to answer the question “What does music look like?”

New York Times slideshow

We Were Wanderers on a Prehistoric Earth - Film

We Were Wanderers On A Prehistoric Earth from James W Griffiths on Vimeo.

“We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth,” says the narrator Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.

We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil.”

The palpable menace that permeates Conrad’s classic novella has been edited out of the narration in this short film, made for Tourism Malaysia by British filmmaker James W. Griffiths.

What remains is a poetic sense of wonder for a natural world that is no longer frightening, no longer in need of being subdued.

In the original, the twisting and turning sentences are like a microcosm of a journey up the winding Congo River, into the metaphorical darkness that lies at the heart of all men. Out of the stillness of the page, Conrad’s imagination washes over us in a rolling wave of words:

The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not.

Griffiths can be forgiven for defanging Conrad. We Were Wanderers on a Prehistoric Earth is a beautiful film, a quiet meditation on the unspoiled rainforest of West Malaysia shot in November by cinematographer Christopher Moon, who also collaborated with Griffiths on last year’s award-winning Nokia cellphone film Splitscreen.

The music is by Lennert Busch, the sound design is by Mauricio d’Orey, and Conrad’s words are spoken by Terry Burns.

What is up with Noises? The Science and Mathematics of Sound, Frequency, and Pitch - YouTube

Mathemagician Vi Hart creates another brilliant stop-motion movie, this time exploring the science and mathematics of sound, frequency and pitch. From Pythagoras to the anatomy of the ear, Hart uses her signature playful hand-illustrations to reveal how simple mathematical ratios make pleasing melodies.

Guitar and computer join forces to teach you how to play

The Tepoe Guitar kit includes a guitar (available in four different colors), headphone practice amp, headphones, digital tuner, guitar strap, computer screen protector, amp adapter plug, USB cable, wall charger, cords, pick, and gig bag

During those important early stages of learning to play guitar, when you need to grab every possible opportunity to practice, digital teaching aids like iPerform3D and the upcoming Rocksmith can be on hand whenever the mood grabs you.

There are also solutions that make learning available wherever your instrument happens to be - such as Castiv's Sidekick (along with an iPhone and the Rock Prodigy app) - and it's to this camp that the Tepoe Guitar belongs.

Rather than positioning the device screen at the end of the fingerboard, inventor Michael Tepoe Nash has sliced away a section of the upper horn of the guitar and placed a small computer there instead.

The guitar itself has a Maple neck, a 22-fret rosewood fingerboard and a humbucker-single-humbucker pickup configuration. Looking down towards the neck, the learner is faced with a small computer screen with physical, push-button controls that supports 720p high definition playback and has 8GB of internal storage (with expansion possible via SD card).

Nash has pre-loaded the Tepoe Guitar's computer with over 30 video lessons, more than 800 instructional diagrams, a music theory e-book, and drum and backing tracks to which students can play along.

Users can also upload their own content - such as video lessons from a favored instructor - from any Windows 7, XP, Vista, and 2000 PC via the included USB port.

The device is also capable of playing NES.net, GBA, and some 32-bit BIN and 64-bit games utilizing the game program of the guitar.

The computer includes its own external speaker, but audio can also be routed to headphones or onward to an amplifier via a 3.5 mm jack.

"For now we only have this one electric model which is geared primarily to teach the beginner," Nash told Gizmag.

"We do have plans on developing a more advanced model for the professional in the future similar to the earlier acoustic prototype, which has the capability of the contemporary laptop computer - including a digital recording studio, effects processor, Bluetooth, touch-screen, 60GB of memory, tablature editor, and many more features that will help the professional guitar player."

The Tepoe Guitar kit includes a guitar (available in four different colors), headphone practice amp, headphones, digital tuner, guitar strap, computer screen protector, amp adapter plug, USB cable, wall charger, cords, pick, and gig bag - and is available now for US$499.

Robotic Hand Control lets you pluck strings like a pro musician

WANT to learn a musical instrument, but can't find the time to practise? A device now under development can take control of your hand and teach you how to play a tune.

No spirits of dead musicians are involved. PossessedHand, being developed jointly by the University of Tokyo, Japan, and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, also in Tokyo, electrically stimulates the muscles in the forearm that move your fingers.

A belt worn around that part of the subject's arm contains 28 electrode pads, which flex the joints between the three bones of each finger and the two bones of the thumb, and provide two wrist movements.

Users were able to sense the movement of their hands that this produced, even with their eyes closed. "The user's fingers are controlled without the user's mind," explains Emi Tamaki of the University of Tokyo, who led the research.

Devices that stimulate people's fingers have been made before, but they used electrodes embedded in the skin, which are invasive, or glove-like devices that make it hard to manipulate an object.

Tamaki claims that her device is far more comfortable. "The electric stimulations are similar to low-frequency massage stimulations that are commonly used," she says.

Astronaut Cady Colman Playing Flute Music in the ISS

Astronaut Katy Colman Playing Flute Music in the ESA Cupola of the ISS. She plays a silver flute from Ian Andreson (Jethro Tull), Matt Molloy's 100-year-old Irish flute and a tin whistle from paddy Maloney of the Chieftains.

You can also see and hear Astro Cady celebrating St Patrick's Day on the ISS - Watch the video

NASA Astronaut Cody Coleman: Plays the Flute and Penny Whistle

Astronaut Cady Coleman took time during an interview with reporters to play her flute onboard the International Space Station.

"I play the flute on the ground and it's one of the things I love to do," said Coleman during an interview with National Public Radio.

"One of the things that I think is important to do is to try to share how amazing it is up here. I relate to flute players and I just wanted them to understand what a cool place it was and how many possibilities there were to play music up here on the space station."

Coleman brought with her to the station four flute-like instruments in her small allotment of personal items.

The collection includes two items from the traditional Irish music group The Chieftains - a penny whistle, which is similar to a recorder, from group-leader Paddy Moloney and a very old Irish flute from Matt Molloy. There is also a flute from Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull and her own personal flute aboard.

"It is really different to play up here," Coleman added. "I've been having the nicest time up in our Cupola. I float around in there. A lot of the times I play with my eyes closed."

During the NPR interview she played Bluenose by Stan Rogers on her personal flute. She also played a tune for the following interview with Houston's KHOU-TV.

Other astronauts have flown flutes in space aboard the space shuttle. Ellen Ochoa, shown in the picture, who is a classical flutist, brought her flute on STS-56 in 1993 and took a moment to play it during an educational event.

John Herrington, who was the first tribal registered Native American astronaut, brought a wooden flute with him on STS-113 in 2002. The flute was hand-carved by a member of the Kennedy Space Center Native American Intertribal Council.

Hearing the sound of Pi

ESA Astronaut Video: Blood Samples, Colbert Treadmill, Noise and Music

Compianos' Upright 1904 Grand Piano PC

Compianos' Upright 1904 Grand Piano

Nothing says elegance like a grand piano, so why not gut an old 1904 Chickering upright grand and load it with computing power? This mod, created by eBay user compianos, popped up on Dvice.

Compianos says his computer has a 6.8GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. The Chickering mod has a built-in 26-inch LCD screen covered by a sliding panel that opens via remote control. The piano also has a hidden drawer for remotes and other goodies.

I love the 3 pedals controlling the mouse!

Photo: Dvice

Synaesthesia: Means Wednesday is Indigo Blue!

Synaesthesia, as it turns out, may be up to seven times as common among artists, novelists and composers as it is among other people. What's more, it seems to run in families. For example, the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (see "From father to son") saw letters in colours, as did his mother - who also heard in colours - and as does his son Dmitri. This obviously lends support to the idea that synaesthesia has a genetic underpinning.

If it is genetic - and common - why would evolution have selected for such a condition? According to Cytowic and Eagleman, it is all "to do with creativity - especially an ease for making metaphoric cross-connections". Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran at the University of California, San Diego, has had a book on metaphor and synaesthesia in the wings for a couple of years, so we may be at the start of a rich theory of synaesthesia, one that could illuminate profound issues in consciousness studies and cognitive science.