TIEM

Jon Cambeul: designer, builder, programmer

The “Wacom Rock Guitar” a.k.a (Speech Guitar) is a USB powered pseudo rock guitar. It is a device that is made from an extensively modified 1999 Wacom intuos graphics tablet combined with an appropriated hand held game console that becomes a wearable interface for the control of an application suite made with Cycling 74’s graphical programming environment Max/MSP. The applications take control of the Apple MacInTalk 3 speech synthesiser making it sing, chant, and drone multiple layers of improvisational synthesised emotionally expressed speech vis-à-vis an aggressive STK Electric Guitar Synthesis.

The Speech Guitar: Improvisational Mobile Street Performance at Trampoline Nottingham UK

Bill Hsu: principal design
John Butcher: research contributions, evaluations

Bill Hsu’s Unnamed instrument consists of 2 components:

1) Real-time audio input drives analysis/resynthesis modules
2) Wacom tablet controls synthesis algorithms

Bill writes —
“Timbral and gestural characteristics are extracted from real-time audio input from a single instrument (usually saxophone). A virtual ensemble of improvising agents references these characteristics in their performance. A user may also control the agents at various levels, such as selecting high-level behavioral tendencies, or fine-grain shaping of timbrally rich gestures.”