[LAU] Laptop Battle Registration and Promotion

[Robin Gareus]

>> I guess the air-guitar will have a a good chance for a come-back once
>> laptops are out of style ;)
> 
> There are people developing sensors for the hands/fingers that can read
> motion in three dimensions and map that to software controllers, to
> produce a playable air-guitar. ;-)

sensors are too complicated. gnu-air-guitar just needs a v4l camera to
recognize famous metal-guitarists poses!

seriously, I've only seen *one* outstanding performance: a japanese
pantomime guy telling a sci-fi stories with Max/DSP. - he had 3 sensors:
 - distance between hands ( 1 dimension)
 - acceleration sensor on each hand. (possibly 2 or 3 D. each)
 - foot-panel (to switch scenes, start/stop, used rarely)

he toggled modes by quickly shaking one of his hands. Most environments
had pitch on hand-rotation and speed/volume on the hand-distance or a
derivative thereof. - the story was prepared, but improvised.

the setup was simple, but it allowed him to both: act freely and have a
subtle control over the sound environment. and most important: it was a
convincing instrument and soundscapes. the audience could make a
connection between his action and the sound . with ~100ms latency ;) -
about 1 years ago !

> IMO, laptops, computer keyboards, etc, are very thin and unexpressive
> replacements for the rich interfaces that we know as real musical
> instruments - guitars, violins, horns, etc. Human hands and fingers,
> human breath control, have been developed and refined for thousands of
> years. Computer user interfaces have a long ways to do to develop that
> degree of expressiveness.

One can use a classical instrument to interface to a computer! - If s.o.
want to make a "glove" to play violin: nice experiment. go and build a
vibrating block to simulate the neck/ear feeling first.

A computer is never a replacement for a /real/ music instrument. For
some it can come pretty close until the battery runs out.. - But as we
all know: computers can generate sound like nothing else!
I've heard of 4 year old violin players, and people who spend > 14 hours
with a saxophone each day. - the Guinness book or records is still
looking for the pure-data-kid. lol.

robin

PS. there are those who do not hear the difference, and will settle for
playing sensor-air-guitar. - beware: they might even be the
marketing-majority in a few years.

PPS. no battle but art: a while back I stumbled over a text-adventure
written in postscript. playable entirely with the Formfeed and Rewind
button. (though ghostview  was more handy) - are there similar
linux-audio pieces?  - any `while (true); do ls -l /dev > /dev/dsp &
sleep 1 ;done;` remixes out there?  techno-bash(7)