London-based singer-songwriter Imogen Heap has designed a pair of digital gloves that allow her to perform elaborate otherworldly symphonies by sculpting the air with her hands. For the past four years she has worked with a team of engineers and designers, including scientists from NASA and MIT, to create the sleek e-textile gloves, which are full of chips and sensors. The gloves allow the wearer to remotely manipulate recorded sound and musical tracks by waving the arms, pointing the fingers, making a fist, rotating the wrists, or air drumming an entire virtual drum kit.
Now Heap and her team want to make the gloves, called Mi.Mu, available to other musicians and performers. They launched a Kickstarter campaign last month that would fund development of ten pairs of gloves and make the technology open-source. Individual musicians will be able to program the gloves to translate movement into sound in ways that feel most intuitive to them by mapping these movements onto music writing software such as Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Logic Pro, or Max MSP—basically, anything programmed to use common digital music languages such as MIDI or Open Sound Control.
The Mi.Mu gloves are sensitive to subtle movements. Tiny hardware boards at the wrist contain an accelerometer, a magnetometer, and a gyroscope that provide precise
information about the speed at which the hand is moving and the orientation of the hand in space (up, down, left, right, forward, or backward). Each glove contains flex sensors over the knuckles to identify the posture of the hand. It also contains a haptic motor near the heel of the hand, which can be programmed to vibrate if, for example, a certain note in a sequence has been hit. And tiny LED lights between the thumb and forefinger can be programmed to blink green or red depending on, say, whether the wearer is in recording mode. In combination, these capabilities allow for thousands of sound manipulations.
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Those who have contributed the roughly $2000 per glove include an ice dance choreographer for Disney, and an actual theremin player, and performance artist in Atlanta. Ultimately, the nonprofit group behind the device, which calls itself The Gloves Project, wants to make the gloves cheaply enough that it can sell them for a few hundred bucks a pair.
"It just feels like the time of the musician hunched behind their laptop is long gone," said Heap, who says she started the project because she wanted a more dynamic and intuitive way to perform her electronic music on stage. "You can do so much with your body, you can use your body as a musical instrument. It's fascinating to watch when other people use the gloves because all of a sudden they realize they're making music in 3D. It takes on this whole spherical, global, shape in your mind."
Heap, who won a 2009 Grammy for best engineered album and who taught herself sound engineering as a kid on an old Atari computer, is not the first musician to use gloves and gestures to manipulate music software. Her inspiration was a demo she saw on a visit to the MIT Media Lab. Then-student Elly Jessop had developed a glove that allowed her to grab a note in the air, hold it and give it vibrato by undulating her wrist. "When Imogen saw that it lit up all her internal light bulbs," said Kelly Snook, a member of the Mi.Mu team who was then a visiting scientist at the lab and had invited Heap to the demonstration.
Heap wrote a song for the gloves called "Me the Machine," about a machine trying to imagine what it feels like to be human, in 2012, and debuted it on Earth Day by streaming it live from her own garden. But the second time she played the song, at TED 2012, it was nearly a bust—and a reminder that this tech is still in its infancy. Because Heap was facing just 15 degrees away from where she was supposed to be, many of the signals were thrown off, said Snook, who is also a musician and a former NASA planetary scientist. Heap had to improvise.
The current Mi.Mu prototype has come a long way since 2012. It consolidates most of the hardware and wiring inside the material of the glove. It is also Wi-Fi enabled rather than Bluetooth, which means Heap is no longer tangled up in gear when she's on stage: she's been able to discard the arm bands and harness she used to have to wear. The Mi.Mu team is also simplifying the software, consolidating four programs into one.
But for now, like so many campaigns, they're just hoping their Kickstarter reaches its goal. Some have balked at the high price, but Snook says it barely covers costs. "We've been very open with our technology and our ideas," she says. "We want as many people as possible to have it and to hack it."
source : http://www.popularmechanics.com
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