YouTube Published on May 21, 2012 by UltrasonicAudioTech
"Syntact™ - a new musical interface based on the revolutionary technology of non-contact tactile feedback. 121 ultrasonic transducers are focusing acoustic energy into one spatial point, thus creating a tangible vibration in midair. Syntact™ enables musicians to virtually mold and shape the sound with their hands. It allows easy and playful generation of meaningful and diverse musical structures."
www.ultrasonic-audio.com"Syntact™ is a new musical interface based on the revolutionary technology of non-contact tactile feedback. 121 ultrasonic transducers are focusing acoustic energy into one spatial point, thus creating a tangible vibration in midair. Syntact™ enables musicians to virtually mold and shape the sound with their hands.
The revolutionary technology behind Syntact™ provides contact-free tactile feedback to the musician. By utilizing airborne ultrasound a force field is created in mid-air that can be sensed in a tactile way. The interface allows a musician to feel the actual sound with its temporal and harmonic texture. While an optical sensor system is interpreting her or his hand gestures, the musician can physically engage with the medium of sound by virtually molding and shaping it – i.e. changing its acoustic appearance – directly with their hands.Syntact™ - graphic representation of (ultra)sound-waves condensing in the focal point of the instrument.
ApplicationsLive music creation and performance
Virtual reality / telepresence
Public interactive multimedia installations in museums, galleries, science centres etc.
Interactive advertising
Control input:Syntact™ is operated via optical hand-gesture analysis. An integrated USB camera is used to analyze the hand position in the focal point region of the instrument. Sophisticated image descriptors are then extracted in real-time and converted to MIDI data, which can further be used to drive any desired sound synthesis/processing parameters in any audio production software or hardware environment.
Tactile feedback:
The feedback section of the instrument uses the analog audio output of any software or hardware synthesizer, instrument, sequencer or any kind of audio generator. It uses the audio signal to compute an ultrasound signal mixture that reflects the harmonic and temporal characteristic of the given audio signal. The ultrasound signal mixture is projected through an annular array of 121 ultrasonic transducers, focusing all the acoustic energy in one spot (the focal point).
