Anon Day killin’ it at the Renegade Lights record release event last December in San Francisco. A bit of an old photo, but worth looking at again. Gear includes: Roland SH-101, DSI Tempest, DSI MoPho and NI Maschine. Photo courtesy of: SpaceCat Photography
Now in its fourth year, the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition has featured some incredibly original and innovative musical instrument designs. Hosted by The Georgia Tech School of Music and the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, the competition awarded this year’s winners a total of $10,000 in cash prizes. The final performances and results were webcast live on Feb. 17th, but for those who missed it, all the videos are available at the Georgia Tech website.
Marco Donnarumma won first place with Xth Sense, a wearable biophysical system which captures, amplifies and manipulates sounds produced by muscles in the human body. The organic, yet glitchy sounds produced by this are controlled by movement of the body, resulting in very physical performance.
Cracked Ray Tube, a system that “disrupts the interfaces of analog televisions and computer monitors to create self-generated electronic noise and video,” developed by Kyle Evans and James Connolly, took second place.
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The RheyneLooper looks like a pretty handy tool for those who make music on the fly and it really expands on the idea of touch screen controllerism.
Jon Barbieri, a.k.a. Rheyne, is a keyboard player and controllerist based in New Jersey. I’ve written about him before, but since then there have been quite a few changes to both our approaches to music. He creates the most awesome chill-out sounds on the fly and loves to share videos that feature this. With close to 60 videos on his YouTube channel, there’s plenty to watch.
His Ableton and Lemur RheyneLooper template complements both his composition and his performance styles, and he’s even included one of the Massive patches that defines his unique sound.
As a side note, I’m glad that the Lemur App is taking a bit of a foothold. There were many broken hearts the day Jazzmutant discontinued the hardware Lemur.
When I began searching for more expressive MIDI controllers, touch-strips were something rare. Now they’re frickin’ everywhere: Novation’s Twitch, Dave Smith/Roger Linns’ Tempest, Akai’s new Max49 and of course, on my own Mojo.
So what I’d like to know is, what’s the next unconventional sensor to work its way into mass acceptance on these sorts of instruments? Arcade buttons? Joysticks? Accelerometers? Whack’a'moles? Let us know your prediction in the comments.
