Gizmorama - March 17, 2014

Good Morning,

If you have any musical talent or you'd like to learn an instrument maybe you can play the gloves. Engineering students have invented a new kind of electronic musical instrument that's controlled by gloves on the player's hands. Now, you can try your hand at music.

Learn about this interesting story and more from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

P.S. Did you miss an issue? You can read every issue from the Gophercentral library of newsletters on our exhaustive archives page. Thousands of issues, all of your favorite publications in chronological order. You can read AND comment. Just click GopherArchives

***
*-- Gloves worn on the hands become an electronic musical instrument --*
ITHACA, N.Y. - Cornell University engineering students say they've invented a new kind of electronic musical instrument controlled by gloves on the player's hands. To play the instrument dubbed Aura, the player dons gloves fitted with sensors that report the position and orientation of the hands in a magnetic field. The magnetic sensors used were original developed for medical applications, motion tracking and manipulation of 3-D graphics, a Cornell release said Tuesday. Through a computer interface, hand positions are converted to signals in the universal MIDI language for electronic instruments and fed to a synthesizer. Raising and lowering the hands controls pitch; spreading them apart increases volume. Closing the fingers activates flex sensors and muffles the sound, while twisting the hands adds distortion. The result looks like a person listening to music and pretending to conduct, but they are instead conjuring music out of thin air, the researchers said. "We're trying to capture those intuitive gestures and make music," engineering studies senior Ray Li said. "The musician will create a whole song on stage with nothing."


*-- Scientist: Exoplanet research needs less hype, more patience --*
PRINCETON, N.J. - The search for exoplanets and alien life is generating a lot of hype but the study needs patience and refinement, a U.S. review of exoplanet research suggests. Review author Adam Burrows, a Princeton University professor of astrophysical sciences, says despite many trumpeted results, few "hard facts" about exoplanets -- planets orbiting distant stars outside our solar system -- have been collected since the first one was detected in 1992, and most of these data are of "marginal utility." That's because the current dominant methods for studying exoplanets and their atmospheres are not intended for objects as distant, dim and complex as planets trillions of miles from Earth but were instead designed to study much closer or brighter objects, such as planets in Earth's solar system and stars, he wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As with any relatively new field of study, fully understanding exoplanets will require a lot of time, resources and patience, Burrows said in a Princeton release Tuesday. "Exoplanet research is in a period of productive fermentation that implies we're doing something new that will indeed mature," he said. "Our observations just aren't yet of a quality that is good enough to draw the conclusions we want to draw." "There's a lot of hype in this subject, a lot of irrational exuberance. Popular media have characterized our understanding as better than it actually is," he said. "They've been able to generate excitement that creates a positive connection between the astrophysics community and the public at large, but it's important not to hype conclusions too much at this point."

Missed an Issue? Visit the Gizmorama Archives