Technology to Turn Gestures into Song From: Chronicle of Higher Education - 02/20/2012 By: David Wheeler University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers have developed speech technology that enables people to speak or sing with hand gestures. The technology consists of a speech synthesizer and a speech-generating system. The speech-generating system uses two gloves and a foot pedal to control the synthesizer. When the right glove opens, it creates vowels, just as the tongue does with its movements in the mouth, and specific gestures create corresponding consonants. The left glove makes stops, such as the sound for "b." The foot pedal controls volume, the equivalent of lung pressure, and pitch can be adjusted by raising or lowering the right hand. Users "can get reasonably good intelligible speech" with about 100 hours of practice, says UBC professor Sidney Fels. Singers have written music for the device, which allows them to perform duets with themselves. The researchers also developed a simplified version of the speech technology that can be used on a tablet computer. Read the entire article at: http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/technology-to-turn-gestures-into-song/28768 Links: Sidney Fels http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~ssfels/ Visual Voice http://hct.ece.ubc.ca/research/visualvoice/index.html Talking with Your Mouth Full: Performing with a Gesture-to-Voice Synthesizer http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2012/webprogram/Paper5909.html The Future of Music? Gesture-to-Hand Synthesizer Creates Strange, Haunting Harmonies (with 5:06 video) http://news.aaas.org/2012_annual_meeting/0219talking-with-your-mouth-full-performing-with-a-gesture-to-voice-synthesizer.shtml Hand-On Music http://www.scienceupdate.com/2012/02/music/