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from the musicians-of-the-future- dept

Mon, Aug 20th 2001 1:01am — Michael Ho
Here's yet another input device for musicians out there. The Mouthesizer will replace your guitar foot pedal for those "wah-wah" effects. Maybe not as impressive as mimicking a Stradivarius violin, but probably more potential for popularity. And if this gets advanced enough, people might not need to talk out loud. Read my lips, no new voice recognition?
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  • identicon
    Dave, 20 Aug 2001 @ 4:24am

    voice box

    This sounds suspiciously like the voice box device which has been around for aaaaages. I'm sure that anyone as old as me will remember Peter Frampton using this gizmo to death.

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Michael, 30 Aug 2001 @ 3:06am

      Re: voice box

      The device known as "the bag" used by Peter Frampton (and others, he was not the first or only 70's guitarist to use it) was a little pneumatic speaker held in the mouth. Moving the mouth changed the acoustic filtering of the guitar signal. Many traditional musical instruments around the world, for example the jaw harp, do essentially the same thing. So this idea goes back to pre-history. By contrast the mouthesizer uses a video input of the mouth to map mouth shape to musical effect. It can be connected to any musical effect via MIDI or voltage controls. The effects that are most intuitive are related to the acoustic effects of changing the mouth shape (such as wah-wah, or vowel filtering) as well as those related to facial expressions - e.g. mapping a grimace to distortion. But it's also interesting to play with mappings that are not immediately intuitive. There are some video clips of the mouthesizer in action available at: http://www.mic.atr.co.jp/~mlyons/mouthesizer.html
      The mouthesizer is one example of the more general facial gesture interface.

      [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Philip Bluhm, 29 Feb 2008 @ 11:30am

    peter framptons mouth box he uses on geico com.

    Is it possible to buy the mouthbox peter uses on the geico commercial thankyou, Phil.

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]


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