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Connected Objects Music

Learn real guitar by playing air guitar using Kurv digital instruments

Learning a musical instrument is rarely an easy road. That difficulty forces many to give up prematurely, robbing them of the opportunity of every really learning a skill that can provide much future enjoyment. As analterantive, the company behind Kurv hopes that people starting of with its stringless digital instrument versus a real one will immediately enjoy making music and stick around long enough to start really playing.

It’s designed in two pieces. The Kurv itself fits around the hand like a glove and offers eight comfortable points that each finger can easily touch. Eight points for the eight notes in an octave, eight notes in a scale and eight chords in a key make it so that there’s variety when the user strums with the second part of the instrument, the pick. Kurv responds to how hard the pick is being strummed. But it also responds to gestures, like shaking and flicking, that shift octaves or creates a vibratto effects in either electric, acoustic or bass guitar modes. Together with the iOS app’s intelligent tutorials on hit songs that provide instant feedback, Kurv is a guitar and tutor all in one.

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Input Music

OWOW’s series of digital instruments has you wave, rotate and air-drum tunes

The ubiquity of computers, smartphones, and tablets have all led to a distinctly digital personality when it comes to music creation. Instead of it being regulated to those who spend years mastering a particular instrument, devices have made it so that anyone with a tune in their head can express it with whatever instrument, sound effect, or voice they can find on the internet. Unfortunately, this has made current methods of music creation look more like coding and less like playing.

With their CRD and DVC series of digital instruments, the Omnipresent World of Wizkids (OWOW) is looking to reinject a bit of fun and actual playing to music creation. The series consists of five compact, plug-and-play instruments played with both touch and gesture controls: waving their hands lets users manipulate sounds with the Wob instrument, rotations of the Wiggle instrument will produce different versions of previously assigned effects while users can air drum above the Drums instrument to create percussion. The Pads instrument is a physical miniature drum pad while the Scan is the most experimental of the bunch; with it, users draw dots or lines beforehand that are interpreted as sounds as the Scan is passed over the design.