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Augmented instruments add virtual input to live music

Modified traditional instruments can essentially play themselves, while also allowing a person to control them

THEY look like just another three-piece band, with drums, violin and guitar. But stop and listen to Edgar Berdahl and his colleagues, and you'll notice things aren't quite what they seem. Strange tones emerge from their instruments, sometimes without any of the performers moving, as an abstract soundscape washes over you.

The Haptic Drum, Overtone Fiddle and Feedback Resonance Guitar are all examples of what Berdahl, who researches technology in music at Stanford University in California, calls actuated instruments.

Berdahl and his colleagues have modified traditional instruments by adding electromagnets and other sensors that can both detect and induce vibrations, blurring the line between physical and computer-generated sounds. The instruments can essentially play themselves, while also allowing a person to control them. This allows very different sounds to be created. "The manner in which the external energy is injected into the instrument enables and even compels the performer to interact in new ways," says Berdahl.

Take the Overtone Fiddle, created by Dan Overholt at Aalborg University, Denmark. It can be played like a regular violin, but signals can also be pumped directly into the instrument's body, causing it to resonate and produce a wider variety of sounds. An iPod Touch controls the signals, allowing the performer to modify effects on the fly, while a bow fitted with a position sensor provides another form of input that can be used to modify the sounds.

The Feedback Resonance Guitar follows a similar construction, using electromagnets to vibrate each of the instrument's six strings at a variety of frequencies. Notes can be artificially sustained, and the guitar can also play traditional rock "feedback" tones without the usual corresponding rise in volume - handy if you want to avoid blowing your amp.

Taking a different approach, the Haptic Drum lets a performer play faster drum rolls than would normally be possible. The drum's skin senses when it has been struck and sends a signal to a loudspeaker directly underneath. The loudspeaker sends a pulse of sound that causes the skin to bounce up against the drumstick, increasing the rate of the drum roll (Organised Sound, DOI: 10.1017 S1355771811000100).

People develop experimental instruments all the time, but none have matched the popularity of the electric guitar, keyboard synthesiser or DJ turntable, the major new instruments of the 20th century. Berdahl believes that augmenting existing instruments makes it more likely they will be adopted since musicians can easily transfer their skills, but in an age when computers can generate any sound, do we even need new instruments?

Tellef Kvifte, who studies musical instruments at the University of Oslo, Norway, says that our relationship with instruments is changing. "The connection between what you do with an instrument and the sound that comes out of it is not as fixed as it used to be," he says. In other words, it's easy to create a violin that sounds like a piano, and vice versa.

"We can synthesise any perceivable sound. However, most sounds are not worth listening to," says Berdahl. "Composing music can be thought of as the task of precisely specifying sounds and organising them in an artistic manner. Our choice is to use specially crafted instruments as an interface to help us select the sounds that we want to put into our artwork."

Jamming with a slime mould

Eduardo Miranda, a composer and researcher in artificial intelligence at the University of Plymouth, has created a slime mould accompanist. He used electrodes to measure the mould's electrical activity as it grew, then fed these signals into sine-wave oscillators to produce sound.

"To begin with we were thinking about making a musical instrument," he says. "Then we began to think this thing is intelligent, so maybe we could interact with it." He's now working on a feedback mechanism to turn audio signals into light, allowing the slime mould to "hear" what its fellow musicians are playing, and will premiere a piece next year written for an ensemble of slime mould and traditional instruments.

Issue 2821 of New Scientist magazine
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Dancing to a new beat (Image: Edgar Berdahl)

Dancing to a new beat (Image: Edgar Berdahl)


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