Belgians are starting to take Adolphe Sax‘s innovation heritage more seriously as a whole series of new musical instruments are making their way into the world.

The Kelstone, invented and developed by Jan Van Kelst, is:

“… a new revolutionary musical instrument with 18 strings, which combines the best of a guitar, a bass-guitar and a piano. To play it you use the hammering technique.”

Bert Schiettecatte, a belgian Stanford University alumnus, recently showed off his AudioCubes at the Flemish regional stand (jointly organized by our friends of Flanders Multimedia Valley and Flanders Investment & Trade) at Cebit in Germany. Part musical instrument, part interface, … by combining and moving around the wireless-enabled, led-lit AudioCubes one can create and play musical patterns which sync to each other and are able to control MIDI-compatible instruments or software. The ability to synchronize light patterns of the cubes to music guarantees a great live performance.

In the audiocubes, I personally see the inspiration of the work and teachings of the wonderful Bill Verplank, whom I had the pleasure to meet on several occasions while he was involved at the former Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea (Italy).  Bill, an interaction design pioneer (yes, Bill Moggridge’s book Designing Interactions is a must buy) is currently part-time lecturer at the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics where he teaches a course on physical interaction design and one on controllers (see here for more info and interesting examples). I do not know whether Bill’s belgian roots (cf. surname) play a role in his interest to apply his knowledge and experience to the design of new musical instruments  (e.g. a haptic controller dubbed ‘The Plank‘), but his work is an extremely valuable contribution to and beyond this field.

For those of you interested in some more research-based developments in this fascinating area, you might want to check out the inspiring work of Prof. Marc Leman at the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music at the University of Ghent and Prof. Godfried-Willem Raes of the Logos Foundation … (e.g. radar/sonar-controlled ‘invisible‘ musical instruments (no, a wee bit more than a room-based theremin)).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 12:04 and is filed under future. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.