Instrumented Bodies: Digital Prostheses for Music and Dance

Documentary preview: Instrumented Bodies

We recently posted a teaser video for our project “Instrumented Bodies: Digital Prostheses for Music and Dance Performance” — enjoy!

http://vimeo.com/68576466

Vibrotactile feedback for the T-Stick DMI

Last year I took a fascinating seminar on haptics taught by Vincent Hayward of the Centre for Intelligent Machines at McGill University. For my final project I equipped the first of the soprano T-Sticks with a vibration actuator with controllable frequency, magnitude, and phase of vibration designed by Vincent and Hsin-Yun Yao. Inspired by a paper they published in Eurohaptics 2006, I adapted the T-Stick software to use vibration to create the illusion that there is a ball rolling inside the instrument – the details are described in the project report. Versions of the T-Stick DMI with programmable vibrotactile feedback will now be used both for performance and for research at McGill on Enactive Interfaces.

WIRED Nextfest

I’ve spent the last few days exhibiting digital musical instruments from the McGill Digital Orchestra at Wired Magazine’s Nextfest in Los Angeles. Here’s a video that popped up on Youtube:

Photosynth demo

Check out this incredible video of Blaise Aguera y Arcas presenting software called “Photosynth” from the TED talks. The software is able to link photos shared online and stitch them together, sharing tagged metadata between different users’ photos. It is also available on the TED website.