Dato Duo

At Everyday Listening, we try not to get distracted by fancy looking gadgets. We do however, love things that are playful. The Dato DUO is a small synthesizer, simple enough to be used by kids. And while the act of making electronic music can be quite lonely experience, the Dato DUO is aimed at playing with two people.

The DUO has two sides, one with a simple sequencer and pentatonic keyboard, and one with a filter and a waveform. This creates a way to sculpt the sound as a duo: a very original way of playing together!

What Dato have done in a very smart way, is tweak the playable parameters in a smart way so there’s still a lot of freedom, but it will never sound really unattractive. An interesting approach for an interesting and difficult target audience. They’re doing a Kickstarter-campaign at the moment.

DIRTI

At IRCAM, the Paris-based Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music, Diemo Schwarz and his team have been developing the very interesting CataRT for quite some time now.

CataRT is a software instrument that realises interactive “corpus-based concatenative synthesis”. That means that it takes a sound, and splits it into little bits which it then analyses. These little bits can then be arranged according to loudness or pitch, for example, and can be played by navigating through the sonic landscape, or the “corpus” if you will. It’s like granular synthesis including knowing what all the grains are and being able to navigate them.

For DIRTI, Diemo Schwarz teamed up with UserStudio to create a physical interface with which children can play the little grains of sound, exploring the sonic body of the source.

There is a webcam under a transparent dish that contains the physical grains, tapioca grains in this case. The movement of the grains is tracked by a camera under the dish, and is sent to a Raspberry Pi, which in turn sends this information to an iPad where the interaction is visualised and sonified using the CataRT realtime sound synthesis system.

 I love installations or applications that are about exploring sounds and invoking active listening, especially for kids, as this really adds to their development. DIRTI makes it nice and tangible, making for a nice exploratory interface.