In our imaginations, we are the best air guitar players and pots and pans drummers that anyone has ever heard. Now, those jam sessions that were once only in our heads can now come to life, thanks to the inventive technology behind Mogees, which stands for “Modual Gestural Surface.”
The idea behind this new technology is that it can turn any object into a musical instrument. How so? By converting the vibrations that are made as a person touches it into sound.
Here’s a quick rundown of this latest invention. Let’s say you place the small sensor onto the surface of a cereal box. Once you connect this sensor to your smartphone, an app will begin running on your phone that both detects and analyzes the vibrations and transforms them into musical notes. You can either keep your musical cereal-playing talents to yourself or you can hook up your smartphone to speakers for everyone to hear; and, depending on your musical skills, this could or couldn’t be a good thing for your neighbors!
The best thing about this invention is that the sound that a person hears is actually coming from the object!
So, who can we credit for this invention? The answer is a music technology researcher by the name of Bruno Zamborlin, who offers a better explanation for his invention:
“It’s a principle called physically inspired sound system. When you play a real instrument, like a guitar, the sound is created by the combination of an exciter and a resonator. The exciter is the plectrum in your hand that hits the strings, and the resonator is the combination of the strings and the body of the guitar. Mogees works in a similar way: everything that is picked up by the sensor — your gestures, the object itself — is the exciter, and the resonator is emulated through the software. We just modify the signal to respect musical rules. We augment it.”
This invention’s app is very hands on and gives the user the chance to select the musical notes and tones that they want to be associated with their gesture. If a person makes the same gesture more than once, they will get the same sounds, thanks to the invention’s functionality.
If you can’t quite picture how this invention works, take a look at this trailer:
We must admit that this “sounds” like one very cool invention!
Copyright Inventionland 2014
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/tech/innovation/mogees-make-music-from-anything/index.html
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