Canadian music professor Bob Pritchard has a tech fix for what ails live electronic music: it’s not sufficiently alive. His solution is to fuse technology with dance, in an “laptop orchestra” composed of musicians, dancers, composers, programmers and hardware specialists, drawn from both Arts and Science and Engineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Pritchard and 17 students in the university music school’s Laptop Orchestra use body movements to prompt synthetic instruments to make sounds, effectively turning moving humans into musical instruments.
“They strap motion sensors to their bodies and instruments, play wearable iPhone instruments, swing Nintendo Wiis or PlayStation Moves, while Kinect video cameras from Sony Xboxes track their movements,” said a story on the university web site,