Cheaper MIDI Physical Interfacing & Healing with Sound

Healing with Sound

I can't help but associate the whole "healing with sound thing" with whacked out hippie alternative medicines. A kind of pseudo science that shares as much as it does with spirituality and incense as it does with physical science.

Atleast this talk by Darren Curtis challanged some of my views on this area. One interesting point to make is that a lot of proper "scientific" research in this area is unavailable to most, being tied up in patents and greedy corporate secrecy. That the corporates have snapped it up may indicate one of two things: either there's money in it and it works, or there's simply money in it regardless.

But then again, whose to say that incense and spirituality aren't good for you? I shouldn't be so closed minded, which is easy to do in this day and age....

Darren Curtis has embarked on an honours thesis with the aim of showing/finding evidence of psychological benefit from sound therapies (11/5/06). He begins by telling us that the ear is connected to everything, an example of this might include the way motion sickness is in part due to fluids within the ear.

Obviously everything resonates at a certain frequency, and I'm lead to believe that it is both popular for crackpot and scientific theories in sound. The lady above is playing quartz bowls which are made to resonate at certain frequencies. Darren tells us that 3kHz is the frequency which seems to effect thinking, although he didn't say how.

He aims oneday to compose special healing music or perhaps even create a software package.


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Curtis, Darren. "Frequency Medicine", EMU, University of Adelaide Forum. 11/05/06

Physical MIDI Interfaces, cheap!

Seb Tomczak is a wonderful wonderful person. Would you like to know why? For his honours project, Seb has decided to research how to make cheap midi controllers or a gestural physical
MIDI interface to be more precise.

Seb Tomczak is a wonderful, wonderful person. Would you like to know why? For his honours project, Seb has decided to research how to make cheap midi controllers or a gestural physical MIDI interface to be more precise. His aim is to build (and document the process online) one of these controllers and use it in a performance. Currently there are two products which perform the same function made by Teleo and I-Cube X which cost $205 and $385 respectively.

Seb hopes to be able to make a comparable product for only $20! There is much more that i could say about this product, but it's probably best to get it straight from the horse's mouth, as it were. You can keep tabs on Seb and view some entries around his honours thesis at http://www.little-scale.blogspot.com/

The reason why I like this idea so much, is that it delivers on a key area of rhetoric used to promote music technology/electronic music in general - Its CHEAP! For years people have spurted how cheap electronic music production can be, how it democratises music and so on. I have never found this the actual case. New technology's are still costly, and the knowledge required to effectively use new technologies is often exclusive. Developers ruthlessly protect their property, as they perhaps should, but i get tired hearing about how cheap and easy new technologies are making music production when comparitivaely the investment required is considerable. It is still hard to make things sound good and cost is prohibitive.

One of Seb's aims is to make his idea accessible to anybody who has an interest, i s'pose the theory is that if you're interested enough, you can learn yourself. I like this. It feels like your getting new knowledge and a gadget for a fraction of the cost. Of course some people are in a hurry and an extra couple of hundred of bucks might be worth the time saved...

Tomzcak, Seb. "Cheeper MIDI Interfacing", Forum. EMU, University of Adelaide. 11/05/06