Elly Jessop and VAMP at the Maker Faire from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

Yann Seznec aka The Amazing Rolo brings CDM his coverage of music tech at the Maker Faire in three episodes today.

Continuing the tradition of computer-augmented vocal performance and interactive gloves, Elena “Elly” Jessop shows off her VAMP system at Maker Faire. Elly is a Masters student at the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future research group, headed by Todd Machover. Interestingly, Elly’s background is in conventional theater, including stage and costume design and choreography.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~ejessop/

VAMP stands for “Vocal Augmentation and Manipulation Prosthesis.” What’s really nice in this demo is that the results sound like more than just effects – they begin to become real augmentation, setting up a complex relationship between the vocalist and the sounds that come out.

It’ll be great to see your work evolve over time, Elly, as you fuse that experience. (And I know what a challenge can be, as I’m still working on fusions of my own, having likewise come from various non-digital backgrounds… heck, I made my way through puppetry class at Sarah Lawrence, even. It’s a lifetime-scale commitment.)

For more on data gloves and such: composer, computer scientist, and futurist Jaron Lanier did lots of seminal thinking about these ideas leading back to the 80s. And you can find some extraordinary work from “augmented vocalists” like Laetitia Sonami and Pamela Z. Here’s a terrific 2006 interview by Sua Constabile for Cycling ‘74 with Laetitia:

Gustavo Bravetti – Alternative Controllers @ Tribaltech 2009 (SC edition) from Gustavo Bravetti on Vimeo.

Friend of the Site Gustavo Bravetti is back, getting the young Brazilian boys and girls on their feet with his virtual reality glove and Wiimotes and gesturally-controlled electronica. Gustavo sends us this video from the 2009 Tribaltech SC Edition in Campinas. Having seen a lot of DJs take the easy way out at festivals in front of throngs of people, it’s great to see someone really play his laptop – and while some of us, ahem, look goofy waving Wiimotes around, Gustavo makes it look good.

Gustavo also gives us the scoop on a new track release, orange. It’s inspired by … wait, Henry Purcell? (Indeed; see also: Wendy Carlos.)

I did produce this track specially for the Tribaltech 2009 SC edition, it was inspired on the classic piece by the baroque composer Henry Purcell (century XVIII), “The Funeral Of Queen Mary”. As usual all synthesizers and fx was made using only Ableton stuff, this time Operator, Analog, and Tension was used to create all synths and effects.

Gustavo also gets a rather eloquent review by our friend David Cross.

The incredibly simple melody of the short ‘Bocuma’ becomes a lump-in-the-throat meditation on man’s place in the universe through subtle pitch shifts and just the right mist of reverb. The slow fade-in on ‘An Eagle in Your Mind’ is the lonesome sound of a gentle wind brushing the surface of Mars moments after the last rocket back to Earth has lifted off.” Why not listen to, Only the Proletariat Floss’s by Screaming at the Mirror. With a truncated syncopation and approach that rivals only Tosh Guarrez pre “FartFlap”, “S.A.T.M” has taken steps to dismantle what was previously only dared mantled by the great Gilda Thrush when she fronted “Cycle Clause”. It’s as if Genghis Kahn got together for breakfast with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Virginia Wolfe and ordered just a bowl of homemade granola and then skipped out on the check. RATING: 11.-111 -David Cross

Previous Gustavo action on CDM:
Live + FM8 = Drum Kit Love: Free FM8 Drum Kit Download
Weekend Inspiration: Ableton Live Follow Actions, Dummy Clips, Making Snares
Gustavo Bravetti Show Us How To Glitch out Ableton Live
Interview: Gustavo Bravetti, Playing Music with Light and Interactive Gloves

Cassette-tape DJ battles are just one of TradeMark G.’s retro, regressive, subversive musical creations. He also likes to put on glasses, a white lab coat, and interactive sewing thimble gloves, in order to produce illegal, copyright-crushing musical performances.

Many of the techno-gimmicks seen here on CDM are one-offs and prototypes. The Evolution Control Committee, by contrast, has been producing “illegal art”, often with the aid of technology, for some 20 years. They’ve been “culture jamming”, dropping Napster bombs (remember Napster?), infamously attracting the ire of CBS, and dressing up as giant pairs of trousers and cans of Parmesan cheese ever since. (I’m especially fond of the giant pants costumes.)

For the last few years, they’ve been perfecting the Thimbletron, a glove with sewing thimbles attached to a hacked M-Audio Oxygen8. (I always knew those Oxygen keyboards would be good for something.) The interface gives them newly-expanded powers of sample triggering. Happily, unlike Wired Magazine, they don’t overuse the term “mash-ups” to describe what they’re doing. Try, instead, “plagiarhythm” or “plunderphonics”: “In the world of The ECC’s music, Public Enemy duke it out with Herb Alpert while TV news anchor Dan Rather is the new frontman for AC/DC.”

Thimbletronic Energy Technology Page (video link at the top)

TradeMark will be performing with the Thimbletron at the Maker Faire, as well as running the cassette tape DJ battle we saw earlier:

Call for Cassette Jockeys @ Maker Faire, Cassette Tech Roundup

CDM (meaning me) will be at Maker Faire all week, sending as much coverage and causing as much havoc as possible. I’m hoping Dan Rather shows up.

More glove music controllers:

Controlling Music with DIY Interactive Gloves

Interactive artists and musicians have long experimented with sensor-packed gloves for controlling music, sound, and video. There’s Laetitia Sonami, who controls Max/MSP with her Lady’s Glove, and many other projects like the Hypersense Complex flex sensor glove-cum-gestural software as seen here this summer. Laetitia’s glove is elegantly sculptural, as seen below, and with years of practice performing with it, she’s built a whole performance practice around the glove as an instrument.

Eric Singer deserves special credit in this category. (See link for projects and videos.) In the early 90s, he hacked the Mattel PowerGlove, a controller for the Nintendo NES, for music. He followed that in 1999 with a Wireless MIDI Glove (right), which sends pressure and bend data for each fingertip.

So, what’s next?

Flex sensors are fab: these cheap strips send varying voltages when you bend them, seen in use in projects like Eric Singer’s sonic banana (basically, a bendable tube for triggering sounds). The trick is turning that flex data into something useful.

Hypersense Complex is a three-person collaborative working on new musical interfaces, and they’ve been nice enough to post details of the hardware and software they’re using. Hardware — all cheap, off-the-shelf stuff you can play with, too. Software — they’re doing fancy Python script interpretation to turn gestures into music in the free sound app SuperCollider. Check out details, sounds, and gallery. Not much aesthetics to their flex sensor glove — any fashion designers out there? But the exploration of musical gloves continues. Via Turbulence.org’s networked_performance blog.