These High Technology Gloves Will Change How We Create Music

Grammy award winning recording artist Imogen Heap created a state of the art wearable glove that turns movement into sound.  This would allow a musician to create the sounds they are going for without having to use instruments or different controllers.  The glove software allows you to “map” glove data to musical control signals (e.g. MIDI) to turn information into music.

These high technology gloves track the orientation of your hand, the “flex” of your fingers, and hand posture.  It also tracks direction, and sharp movements (such as drum hits), and can transmit the information wirelessly to your computer over Wifi.
The gloves are lightweight and self contained so you won’t need much more than a laptop to get the full functionality.

If you’re trying to wrap your head around what this means and the possibilities check this out…

Imagine that instead of turning up a fader to add reverb to your music, you can raise your arms instead to achieve the same effect. If you want to move a sound around a room, you could just point to where you want the sound to be.  Not only does this come more naturally and is more intuitive, this can make for a great performance because your fans would  really enjoy watching you do your thing in a new and interesting way.

The objective is to break down the barriers between machines and music, and between audiences and performers.  Just think, if you’re a touring musician you could avoid the headaches of shipping a lot of technological equipment everywhere you perform.  You can share your music in way that stands out from the crowd.

This glove can be used to enhance music performances, and can be used in many other potential applications.  For example, people can learn an instrument in a cool new way.  A deaf person can communicate with gestures that emit audible words (or songs) that allow them to communicate with people who don’t know sign language.  Virtual reality can also be taken to a new level etc.

Hopefully in the future this technology will soon become accessible to musicians around the world at an affordable price.   If so, these gloves can revolutionize how music can be performed and composed.

The possibilities are endless.