We have been looking at many different types of technologies
for capturing human motion or even muscle sensing,
and other types of data.
These are used for the analysis and for more
scientific purposes.
In our group here, at the University of Oslo-- and also,
around the world-- many people is
using the same type of technologies to create music.
And one word that describes this that's often used
is that of "NIME," which stands for "New Interfaces
for Musical Expression."
And here, one of the ideas is that we use technology
to create sounds and music, but this also
requires that we work with the mappings
from then different types of motion to sound.
And Kristian, you have a sensor here now.
And can you just tell me a little bit
about how you have been approaching
this when you have been trying to make this
into a musical instrument.
Sure.
I've been looking at this armband called the MYO, which
has eight sensors that captures the muscle tension of the lower
arm in addition to gyroscope and accelerometer,
which allows you to extract the orientation of the device.
And I've been using this for a musical instrument
to control sound that's already there,
sort of process with sound effects
and also to trigger sounds, like piano sounds or drum sounds.
[SOUNDS PLAYING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC REVERBERATING]
[MUSIC REVERBERATING FASTER]
[DRUM SOUNDS PLAYING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC INTENSIFYING]
It's quite effective in how it works.
With low latency and very high-sampling rate on the data.
How is this connected to kind of the studies you have been
doing on sounds and actions?
How is this related to working-- I mean, the other way
around, really?
What is interesting is, when you know how people relate movement
to sound, you can use that knowledge
to map the data from this device into a synthesiser.
For instance, if you were to control some sort of tone going
up and down, maybe you would want
to use this armband going up and down to control that pitch.
So if you know that people relate pitch
to vertical movement up and down,
maybe you want to use that information
and let this movement be mapped to pitch on your synthesiser.
One thing that many people often are a little bit confused about
is this-- when we were talking about technologies that you
have, either you can make an instrument
or you can make more of a musical device.
What is your take on this?
Well, I guess that's a big debate,
but I don't see why we should confine musical instruments
to very narrow things.
I would say, if you use this to control a DJ mix,
it's still a musical instrument.
It's not some sort of musical device only.
A musical instrument can be many things.
So one of the things that we see when
we work with music technology for creating new music,
is that it is possible to use knowledge
from our scientific studies also for creative studies.
And what we also learned is that it's
possible to use really any type of technology to create
new musical instruments.