This Saxophone playing robot from Japan was posted at Make:. I belive it is trying to play John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”. The video is from Dailymotion. There are also some close-up photos available of the onboard gears and motors posted at DEVICE.
The Enactive Network is a multidisciplinary research community with a focus on human-computer interfaces called Enactive Interfaces. They have a list of papers and articles, developed within the Enactive Scientific Community.
The Acoustic, the Digital and the Body: A Survey on Musical Instruments — a paper by Thor Magnusson and Enrike Hurtado Mendieta, presenting the results of their survey on people’s relationship with their instrument, from the NIME 2007 conference. The survey focused on the question of embodiment and its different modalities in the fields of acoustic and digital instruments.
Thor Magnusson and Enrike Hurtado Mendieta conducted A Survey on Musical Instruments looking at people’s relationship with their instrument. The survey focused on the question of embodiment and its different modalities in the fields of acoustic and digital instruments.
The paper and slides from the Panel Session: The Need of Formats for Streaming and Storing Music-Related Movement and Gesture Data, 2007 International Computer Music Conference, Copenhagen provides a good overvie of the following topics —
The Clarinet Gestural Analysis project, based in the Music Technology Area, Schulich School of Music, McGill University is investigating the correlation between physical and musical gestures.
The research has a specific focus on expressive movements (also called ancillary or non-obvious gestures), movements that do not have a direct link to the generation of sound, but are an integral part of the performance.
The Musical Gestures Project, University of Oslo, Department of Musicology, is a broadly conceived research project on music-related gestures, based on the conviction that there are intimate links between music, understood as sonic art, and gestures, understood as human bodily movement.
The Sun SPOT (Sun Small Programable Object Technology) project explores wireless transducer technologies that enable the emerging network of things. The Sun SPOT Device is a small, wireless, battery powered experimental platform. It is programmed almost entirely in Java to allow regular programmers to create projects that used to require specialized embedded system development skills. The hardware platform includes a range of built-in sensors as well as the ability to easily interface to external devices.
SensorWiki is a review of the main types of sensing technologies used in musical applications.
The project was started in 2004 by Prof. Marcelo M. Wanderley and several graduate students at the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory, at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The main students collaborating in this project include: Paul Kosek, Mark Zadel, Elliot Sinyor, David Birnbaum, Joseph Malloch, Mark Marshall, Avrum Hollinger, Stephen Sinclair, Simon de Leon and Alexander Refsum Jensenius.
Since November 2005, this wiki has been available to the community in general.
Garth Paine maintains a blog about new instruments, sensors, electroacoustics and his own projects.