Mycelia: shaping a new landscape for music

• Author: Catherine Jewell
• Position: Communications Division, WIPO

She is also making the music for the upcoming theatre production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, to open in London in June 2016, but took time out to talk to WIPO Magazine.

How did your interest in technology and music come about?

Well you can’t go far in music without coming across technology, but perhaps my first real interest was in the player piano at home. Then at the age of 12 you’d find me playing about on an Atari with music software in a neglected cupboard at my boarding school. From the age of 15, I learned about recording real audio in the studio at the BRIT School for the Performing Arts and Technology in London.

How did you come to develop the Mi.Mu gloves?

Before I developed the gloves, you’d see me on stage running from one piece of equipment to another to create and record my layered sounds. I always felt limited when sampling or playing software instruments as they never came close to the expressivity of real instruments. When I came across Elly Jessop’s VAMP (vocal augmentation and manipulation prosthesis) gloves at the MIT Media Lab in the USA, I realized those days were over. I wanted to work with Elly, but she was locked into commitments at MIT, so when I returned to the UK, I asked Tom Mitchell, a lecturer at the University of the West of England, if he would help me develop our own system. That was six years ago and now there are eight of us working on Mi.Mu.

The gloves plumb into my music software and give me much greater freedom on stage to remotely access my computer software. Once they are programmed, playing music with them is intuitive and expressive. I can create different sounds and layer them up wirelessly using different hand postures and movements. For example, with a simple pinch action, I can capture and record a sound and loop it by releasing my grip.

We have been blogging about the gloves throughout their development and hope to make our “Glover” software - it connects our gloves and other gestural interfaces (e.g. Kinect, Leap Motion) to anything that listens to MIDI and OSC - freely available soon. The gloves are currently handmade to order, but we hope to have a solution for manufacture by the end of the year.

Do you agree that we are in a golden age of music?

In some respects yes, because almost any piece of music is at our fingertips at any time.

On the creation side of things, the convergence of different media – technology, music, art and film-making – has created a massive melting pot and...