Music Technology And Therapy

Music therapy can be a powerful transformative influence on people’s lives, and music technology developments are allowing it to reach further than ever before. A recent soundbeam project by students of DIT won the Microsoft Imagine Cup and will be representing Ireland at the finals in Poland…

Moving With The Music

Imaginote
Nikola Nevin and Marco Castorina won the Irish Imagine Cup competition with their ‘Imaginote’ project, which uses soundbeam controllers to translate physical movements into a combination of music and visual animation.

This sort of technology has been around for a while – I previously wrote a piece about Soundbeam in the context of music controllers back in 2007 – and the Drake music project has been particularly instrumental (ahem) in promoting the cause of musical expression in those who may have physical difficulties in manipulating traditional instruments.

However, it’s great to see such inclusive use being made of new music technologies. The combination of audio and visual output in this project means that it can be used as an educational device for children with learning difficulties such as dyscalculia or dyslexia, or indeed to allow a blind child to perform a duet with a deaf child. This sort of combination of visual cues for musical timings was popularised in games like Guitar Hero, but here we see how it can be taken in other directions…



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