Meet the Techno-Collagist Who Turns Lasers and Human Limbs into Instruments: Sound Builders

Published on Sep 9, 2014 Motherboard

Also see: Meet the Sonic Artist Making Music with Plants: Sound Builders

"After spending the last month feather dusting episodes from season one of Sound Builders, we're positively tickled to bring to you a fresh batch of sonic-bending episodes.

In this latest installment of Sound Builders we meet today's sonic artists who are pushing the audio experience to a whole new level by harnessing sound and technology to create their own instruments. Hosting this time around is singer, artist and frequent Blood Orange collaborator Samantha Urbani.

In episode one, we go to Bushwick to meet with Brooklyn-based, interactive sound artist Adriano Clemente. He's a DJ, hacker, gamer and music producer but to sum things up, we've dubbed him a techno-collagist. It's the most accurate description for Adriano, since he uses a multitude of existing technology and custom parts whose official purposes are hardly designed for making music.

We see this firsthand when our host Samantha had her arm turned into an analog instrument. With a medical sensor strapped to her forearm, Adriano was able to turn her muscle contractions into data to perform and compose music through the rarely explored art of biofeedback.

Adriano goes on to explore the relationship between body, sensors and sound by showing us how a piezo contact microphone can be used to transform any piece of backyard junk into a percussive and melodic instrument. Some people call it physical modeling synthesis but we just call it pretty much amazing.

Adriano's objective is clear: to create a new kinesthetic approach to sound design that totally flips our notion that music is made from a traditional instrument or from interfacing with your mouse, keyboard and screen. This kind of research in tactile, computer music embodiment is not only important for reimagining our conventional vision of an instrument, but also for cutting in half the frustration from wanting to perform in front of millions but having no idea how to play a single note.

To learn more about harnessing the power of music, also check out "The Distortion of Sound," a new documentary about the decline of high-fidelity sound: http://distortionofsound.com/

Check out more episodes of Sounder Builders: http://bit.ly/1qCzF9t"