Experiments In Sound

Bruno Zamborlin, a PHD student at London University, has contacted us regarding something he calls the Mogees. Details are not very specific, but the device consists of a “very cheap contact microphone” that is utilized to recognize different types of fingers inputs in a variety of gestures. In addition, being a contact mic allows it to “transform any surface into an interactive board.”

The Mogees features realtime gesture recognition that allows a user to “play” different virtual music instruments using a technique called physic modelling.

In the video below Zamborlin claims to use two different audio synthesis techniques:
1- physic[al] modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws;
2- concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database.

Mooges has been developed in collaboration with Norbert Schnell and takes full advantage of the MuBu environment for MaxMSP. Bruno also asserts that a “mobile version would be definitely possible.”

Bruno Zamborlin

SmithsonMartin has announced the Kontrol Surface 1974, an innovative multi-touch MIDI control surface from the developers of the Emulator DJ platform. The new KS-1974 is a tabletop version of the Emulator with the same interface as their flagship product, but without the sexy, transparent touchscreen interface. SmithsonMartin’s KS-1974 connects to your laptop / desktop to transform it into a 22 inch controller with 4 simultaneous touch points. Emulator for Traktor and Emulator Modular come bundled with the KS-1974…

Read More About The SmithsonMartin Kontrol Surface KS-1974

…The keys have built-in sensors which makes them touch and pressure sensitive. With the help of capacitive touch sensors the evo is able to read your fingers movement on top of a keys surface adding a third layer of polyphonic data input for mind-bending sonic control of individual notes during a performance. Basically, this can translate to having a pitch or mod wheel integrated into every single key.

Read more about the Endavour EVO Keyboard…

Thanks to Pepsi’s awesome Refresh Project, technology originally developed for the last World Cup has been utilized to allow Blind Soccer (Football) Players to “see” the field of play utilizing directional sound.



Created by Tracab, this system was comprised of sixteen cameras covering the entire field — including two innovative stereovision cameras placed at mid-field, and used the different colors of the team jersey’s to distinguish the home team from the away team, and to identify the referees. This set up, which was deployed during the last World Cup, essentially tracked the position of each player in real-time. This information was then funneled into an iPhone attached to each player’s headset, and converted into a surround-sound landscape, using an app created by a company called Society 46…

The Sound Of Football