The ways in which people can reimagine the beloved turntable seems boundless. We’ve seen bass guitar turntables, computer scratching visualizations, turntable-controlled vibrating chaise longues, and turntables embedded in tree trunks as art installations. Still, there’s more:

TurntablistPC is an ongoing art project coupling a vintage turntable with a vintage PC, creating a hybrid, record-playing server that can be controlled remotely by remote websites around the world. It’s the creation of artist Mogen Jacobsen, and it’s currently being exhibited as part of a show called Webscape at the Art Museum of West Sealand, Denmark. What? You’re not planning to pass through West Sealand this fall? The museum still wants your help: embed a piece of code, and visitors to your own website will trigger manipulations of the turntable based on geographic position.

TurntablistPC Project Page
The TurntablistPC spins again! [Networked Music Review, my new favorite source for artsy music tech!]

Thanks to our artist friend Michael Una for tipping us off. I’m not sure I’ll be building anything of this sort soon, but what I do like about it conceptually is that it returns playback devices — increasingly abstract and virtual in the age of the iPod — to the realm of mechanical instrument. I think we may see all sorts of strange, new, hybrid digital/mechanical instruments in the coming years.

Of course, if you can’t figure out how to turn a turntable into a hybrid server art installation, you can always just don your black vinyl jumpsuit and strap your turntable to your back. I think Numark’s idea here was to somehow promote their turntables, but to me, they may have stumbled onto a new, futuristic couture in which we wear heavy objects as fashion statements. And for whatever reason, I’m game! (People could, you know, come up to you … I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine sorta thing?)

Making_sound grabbed this shot and sent it to our Flickr group; thanks!

Daft Punk is on a mind-blowingly cool tour. Aside from, you know, being Daft Punk, they’ve assembled dazzling futuristic visuals, slick leather jumpsuits, and sophisticated, animated LED helmets.

What? You want to tour with LED helmets, too? It’s easy, outlined in a PDF by the creators. I can make the steps even more brief:

1. Cast your face and make a bust of the face and clay models of all the parts.
2. Modify a motorcycle helmet for the electronics.
3. Design your own LED display and controller board.
4. Glue in LEDs … one … at … a time … and connect three feet of wiring per LED.
5. Build another custom PC board for a control keypad on the armband. (Hey, step #3 was easy enough, right?)
6. Custom manufacture all the exterior plastic and finishing.
7. Paint

The best way to experience all of this is in person, naturally, but here’s a roundup of some terrific coverage.

Daft Punk Concert report and lots of technical details, via our friend Chris O’Shea / Pixelsumo (who points to all the details on the visuals and costumes)

Word of an Upcoming Daft Punk Movie, from our friend and CDM contributor Quantazelle (Liz McLean Knight)

Many, many, many Daft Punk videos on dailymotion.com

Brilliant black-and-white snaps backstage on Flickr from leather jumpsuit designer Hedi Slimane

Alien, futuristic action figures — because they can.

Gobs of videos of the pair in action:

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

Your stupid, low-tech t-shirts. All they do is sit there. You can’t even hook them into a computer and control instruments live. Pathetic. John Malloy points us to a project by Dr. Richard Helmer, an engineer from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Belment, Australia. By embedding “textile motion sensors” (using conductive fibers, basically, so the fabric becomes a big set of resistors), you can play a real air guitar:

Air guitar T-shirt rocks for real [BBC News]
It’s not rocket science… it’s rockin’ science [CSIRO Article; site is a little slow, probably because of BBC traffic!]

The textile end is just half the equation; the team built custom software for interpreting gestures. It even maps to both right- and left-handed wearers, so us rightie elitists can’t continue to abuse the downtrodden lefties of the world.

Don’t like guitars? They’ve played tambourine and guiro, too.

For related projects, see CDM’s wearable tag.

Any CDM readers out there who have played with conductive textiles? (Come on, NYU ITP students, I know you’re reading.)

[tags]fashion, wearable, physical-computing, sensors, hardware, guitars, oddities[/tags]

There are many high-tech solutions to making fashion into a musical instrument, like embedding sound circuitry, sensors, and wireless transmitters. Designer Alyce Santaro has found a low-tech, but ingenious, solution: weaving a special textile out of recycled audio tape. Dresses, flags, and even messenger bags can suddenly incorporate audio materials. In 2003, Alyce built a special commission for John Fishman of Phish that allowed him to play rhythmic sound collages on the garment. (Shown at right; thanks, Alyce!)

If you’re in NYC, you can check out Alyce’s work in person at the January 4 Dorkbot meeting at the Location One gallery. Or check out more online:

Sonic Fabric Site

Alyce Santoro Portfolio

Fishman Dress Movie [zipped]

Sonic Fabric Gallery

You can expect textiles to be a major source of innovation in the near future: think conductive materials and flex sensors, cabling built into garments (via conductive fibers, not bulky traditional cables), and more, especially once embedded circuits get smaller, cheaper, and easier to use. Now, whether you look geeky or hot — and, more importantly, how you sound — is entirely up to you. CDM’s previous roundup looked at just a few possibilities (and sparked plenty of discussion):

Sonic Clothing Roundup: Projects, Resources, DIY

Tim’s back with another tip. Baltimore bender Peter Blasser has created oddities like the much-blogged worm-powered synth (using worms as connections for a circuit-bend patch bay; via Music thing) and bent wooden synth kits (also via MT).

But that’s not all. Blasser, aka Ciato-Lonbarseee, has plenty of other strange creations:

Many odd synths, many odd names: Blasser catalog

I love the eerie sounds of the percussive analog jacket. There’s another whole page of wooden and electronic oddities, like the “bass in a picnic basket.”

Some things can be explained. Some cannot, like these pages of instruments. Go explore and enjoy.

Régine at WWMNA points to Tremor, a “tactile music sleeve is a piece of clubwear that allows the user to ‘feel’ the music that is being played in the club.” Supposedly helpful to those with hearing difficulties.

Hmm . . . not sure which club you’ve been going to, but one generally finds you can feel the music as vibrations without wearing any additional gear. And if you’re a regular, well, pretty much everyone winds up with hearing difficulties.

There is one novelty: vibrations are split into bass, mid, and treble — I do like that idea. (Oh, and it lights up.) There’s an idea here, but it’s not quite fully formed. So what kind of smart clothing gear would you want? (The good news here is they found ultra-slim rechargeable batteries to charge it, which is usually the smartwear challenge.)

Okay, bondage gear probably isn’t what designed Danielle Wilde had in mind when she created the stunningly gorgeous design of her Ange musical ribcage. The inspiration was “a woman whose back has been flayed, exposing the musculature and bone structure and creating the suggestion of wings.” But if this doesn’t suggest a future of (beautiful, of course) interactive bondage gear, I don’t know what does. Get your stage show ready, kids.

Tara Creme’s sound design includes “breathy notes, a gong, rushing water, drums and an oboe,” reports Regine at we make money not art.

Got an interactive audio wearable? Fabulous MIDI costume? Let us know — and if possible, please send photos and sound samples!

[Updated] No, not t-shirts with band names on it. I’m talking about wearable, interactive clothing with integrated electronics that respond to or generate sound. Inspired by the latest picks from Regine at we make money not art, I’ve decided it’s time for a roundup:

Musical Gloves: Perhaps the most ubiquitous form of wearable sonic accessory, musical gloves hit their peak as Max artists in the early 90s appropriated the VR gaming toy, the Mattel Power Glove. Richard Boulanger was responsible for a lot of the early research, assisted by Eric Singer who went on to create a 1999 wireless MIDI glove of his own (see his project page.) The tradition of experimenting with toys continues now, as musicians use the P5 data glove and other gaming products. (see CDM story and how-to) All of these involve solo sonic pleasure (sorry) — for hooking up with another musician’s glove, WWMNA has info on the Haptic Gloves by Kaho Abe and Jung Sin, which make music when you link hands together.

Responsive Clothes and the Denim Synth Jacket: Researcher Joanna Berzowska is behind a variety of “reactive fashion” projects, many of them involving sound — follow her, and you’ll find a lot of the hot wearable stuff. She’s the founder, for instance, of International Fashion Machines, dedicated to interactive textiles and wearables, co-founded by another major pioneer, MIT vet Maggie Orth. A team led by Orth has developed “squeezable instruments” (think embroidered musical pillows) and a
musical jacket complete with a built-in MIDI synth and speakers — the keys are embroidered into the Levi’s denim. (see research paper, as sent by a reader in comments) Berzowska-founded XS Labs has still more projects, like the soundSleevs which include contacts that produce sound as you flex your arms and body. (source code available)

Noise Shirt and Sonic Dress: WWMNA this week also has the scoop on a t-shirt that measures ambient noise levels and displays them on a live LED. Great for workplace safety, sure, but you know you want to wear this to Crobar. Dig the charging hanger. Also at WWMNA is sonic fabric; woven-in, pre-recorded audio tape can be played by running a tape head on it. (That basic technique was long ago used by artists like Nam-Jun Paik.) Upshot is, you get a sonic suit / sonic dress you can play!

Wearables and Progressive Celtic Music: Academics aside, the real action comes from musicians. CDM reader Kevin of prog-Celtic band The Nettles (what, you’ve never heard prog-Celtic?) tells us he’s got some wearables of his own: “musical pants” via drum sensors and sticks, and possibly even something in his shoes. (Kevin: I don’t want to give too much away, mate!) DIY drum triggers are one of the easiest ways of adding sensing; Kevin points us to a great resource I’ve been digging through called EDrum for Free. And in my favorite advice received from a reader, Kevin told me “don’t feel shy about sticks.” (I was wary of beating my legs with them, but he says it’s all good . . .)

Sensor shoes: From a reader comes the Sensor Shoes, designed by Joe Paradiso, MIT Media Lab, which collect a surprising amount of data regarding pressure and position and transmit them to a computer. Dancing feet, I’ve got these dancing feet . . .

Wearables Yahoo group: Regine sends us a link to a ‘wearables’ group called 21f — lots of subscribers, but also lots of lurkers. (So get on there and post!)

Send your projects and favorites: I’m out of breath. So, did I miss any? I’d love to put together a comprehensive list of some of the coolest projects. I’m sure some of you readers (ITP students, you know who you are) have come up with things, too. Drop me a line.