MIT Media Lab: Audiopad

[jrtom]

"Audiopad is a composition and performance instrument for electronic music which tracks the positions of objects on a tabletop surface and converts their motion into music."

Cool stuff.

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Oooh, interesting.

The first thing that springs to my mind is "What would happen if you combined this with a chess board?"

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking a series of ambient compositions, collectively titled "J'Adoube (I Adjust)". ;)

An interesting sidebar: could one learn to identify an opening sequence, or even a position, from the associated music alone?

[lightning-rose.livejournal.com]

Myself, I was thinking of "Dance, Dance, Revolution". :)

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Well, sort of, except inverted: rather than people moving in response to music, it's music responding to motion. Now that you mention this, though, I am reminded of the scene in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age in which the music to which a number of people are dancing is determined, in part, by the pattern of their dance.

Bah humbug

[fdmts.livejournal.com]

That's nothing, I've got an instrument that sings in response to the temperature outside, combined with the comfort level of the humans inside. I call it "the heat pipes in my house."

No, wait, wait: I've got an instrument that responds to the spiciness of the food I eat and the stress and exercise that I get. I call it "my belly." (Tonight, the kimchee 'evensong')

Humbug.

Re: Bah humbug

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, and I've got an instrument that sings in reponse to a complex series of electrical impulses, carefully fashioned by various people over a period of years. I call it "my stereo".

When you can get your belly (or your heat pipes) to sing, say, "Mary Had A Little Lamb", then we'll talk. ;)

Re: Bah humbug

[fdmts.livejournal.com]

The core of my humbug-ness are the imbeciles who take DNA sequences and somehow map them to pitches, and then "play" the "music of our genes."

To anything that even remotely smacks of that sort of crap, I say "HUMBUG!"

Re: Bah humbug

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

DNA -> music: reminds me of arguments (and their quasi-futility) about "minimum description length" as a basis for distinguishing among models. Also of my own efforts to memorize pi based on associating a pitch with each digit.

But, well, none of this has anything to do with Audiopad, as far as I can tell. It's sort of like playing around with things like GarageBand, but with a different interface. Perhaps your comments were intended to apply to the "audiopad using a chessboard" concept--since one might argue that that's a form of "found art" rather than art created on its own terms, which sounds like what's bugging you--but if so, you could have made that more clear. :)