Billaboop
Friday, January 23rd, 2009BillaBoop is an awesome project by Amaury Hazan (also involved in the iPhone RjDj generative music project).
BillaBoop is a real-time audio driven drum controller which allows the user to control up to 3 drum instruments. The user can control any drum synth with the voice (beat box), or any object or musical instrument.
In other words, you can play a soft-synth on your computer by percussive playing with real physical objects - a pen on a jar or your fingers on a desk…. Watch the video below to see this in action.
What’s more, BillaBoop uses Machine Learning to enable the system to learn by demonstration.
I will definitely be trying this out when I get some more time on my hands. I’ve always wanted to be able to capture little rhythms from tapping my fingers or playing the objects on my desk as I procrastinate or even listen to some other music on headphones….
BillaBoop is indicative of the present idea in the zeitgeist of audio control by sound analysis. Another fantastic sounding new example is Ableton Live 8’s groove features that can extract a groove from any audio or midi - and apply it to different audio. Two other examples of audio analysis controllers were seen recently on Johnny Chung Lee’s Procrastineering blog : Sensitive Object and Scratch Input. Finally, another older favourite of mine: sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! (also see the great explanatory video on youtube).