The Null Device
2001/8/22
Scientists in Japan have developed a musical control device that responds to the shape of the player's mouth:
A pickup on the guitar converts the notes being played into MIDI, the language of electronic music that can define properties of musical notes such as their pitch and duration. Meanwhile, a miniature head-mounted digital camera monitors the shape of your mouth and sends instructions to a synthesiser, which modifies the MIDI properties of the notes. Stretching your mouth wide in a soul-searching grimace produces a gritty, distorted sound, while opening and closing the mouth yields a plaintive wah-wah effect.
Interesting; though if they make one that works on audio rather than MIDI, and controls filters or some sort of resynthesis engine, it may be even better.
Where media becomes culture: An article on the remix as fan-fiction, where fans of artists do their own unauthorised rearrangements of recorded music. There is already one site devoted to remixes of Björk by her fans, something of which the Ickle One is apparently aware and seems to tolerate. And then there's always Closer To Spice and Oops The Real Slim Shady Did It Again...
I'm a fan of the remix as an artistic medium; sometimes after listening to a piece of music, I start rearranging it in my head, coming up with ways to reinterpret it. I once did a drum & bass remix of This Mortal Coil's Another Day; I, of course, never released or uploaded it anywhere (doing so would be a massive copyright violation, as it uses great swathes of audio from the original), though people sometimes tell me I should polish it up and send it to 4AD. Then I did a remix for a Melbourne singer/songwriter who thought it was "too spun out". And then there is my contribution to the FourPlay remix project.