[LAU] Laptop Battle Registration and Promotion

[david]

Robin Gareus wrote:
>>> 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.

Yes, you can. But I'd be very surprised if a MIDI setup could accurately 
record the effect of bowing on a violin's tone, or the difference in 
breath control between a great flautist's and a merely good flautist.

> 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!

That's one thing I dislike about the modern digital/sampler emphasis on 
sound synthesis. I remember when Moog and other analog synthesizer 
engineers were pursuing tasks such as synthesizing trumpets or human 
voices. With the advent of sound sampling, the industry basically 
dropped pure synthesis in favor of glorified digital Mellotrons. There 
are no non-electronic instruments that can do the things that the analog 
synthesizers can do, so there's a lot of sounds still not being fully 
used these days.

I want an open source Moog! Not the $300 proprietary software one!

> 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.

Go for it, 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)

A new genre of music for true geeks!

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community