MiMU, the company behind the MiMU Gloves gestural MIDI controller, has introduced Glover, a new environment for connecting motion-tracking devices to your music software.
Glover lets you map physical gestural to MIDI (or OSC), letting you create your own gestural language for music making. The software supports a wide range of motion tracking devices, including iPhone, Leap Motion, micro:bit and the MiMU Gloves.
With Glover, you can essentially play anything – your soft synths, your hardware or your DAW – like a theremin. But machine learning means that you can use gesture recognition to go even further.
Glover is essentially the heart of the MiMu Gloves – letting you control how your physical gestures – captured via sensors – are translated into musical information. It lets you take motion tracking devices and customize how they control music software, such as Ableton Live, Mainstage or Logic Pro.
Gesture recognition algorithms analyze the data coming in from your sensor, and then let you map it to MIDI or OSC. For example, you might make a ‘fist’ to start recording a loop ,or move your hand upwards to add reverb to your voice.
Glover was originally designed as the mapping environment for the MiMU Gloves, but it has been expanded to support a wider range of devices.
Features:
- Dedicated software for composing and performing music using movement, connecting to third party music software
- Supports movement based controllers including iPhone, Leap Motion, micro:bit, and more.
- Connect your movements and gestures to MIDI / OSC
- Gesture recognition via machine learning.
- Design your own expressive language for music by creating unique mappings.
- Integrates with MiMU’s free smartphone app Gliss
- Includes license for Arturia Analog Lab Intro
Pricing and Availability
Glover is available now for $159. A demo version is also available.
I’ll wait for the d-beam module
That’s one way for me to completely freak out my family. By the way, many people were doing this 10-15 years ago using a Wii controller and Symbolic Sounds Kyma.
This type of innovation is somewhat paradoxical by nature. On one hand (no pun intended), it could be the missing link of expressive control that we’ve been needing; and as such it slowly is adopted with an expanding and loyal user-base. On the other, it could quickly prove to be irrelevant– and not necessarily for lack of usability. It’s a fickle controller world out there.
A user has to be able to picture themselves making amazing use of it.
I still very much prefer velocity keys, sliders, B.C. and knobs (roughly in that order) to rubbing glass or waving my hands about. Yes, YMMV.
It’s certainly cool and great fun to use but it’s hardly new or innovative. You’ll find videos of this kind of thing on YT going back nearly 20 years now. LEAP motion was founded in 2010. Almost every person in my degree course (music media tech) at some point did a thesis or assignment that repurposed a generic wireless controller to be a gestural music controller. There are literally a thousand ways to achieve similar results. Personally I’ve used Max MSP, OSC and a Bluetooth PS3 controller to automate Ableton Granulator.
On the face of it stuff like this looks immediate and fun. But when you get down to using it with your own patches and sounds, there’s a lot of remapping and assigning to be done. Then you have to tweak offsets and thresholds so that you don’t get drastic results
It’s a nice looking UI all the same
You’re missing the point.
We all know that lots of music geeks played around with using their Power Glove as a MIDI controller 20 years ago. But like most ‘experimental’ music, 99% of this was complete and utter wankery.
In the last few years, though, people have taken this technology beyond wanking. People are doing cool stuff with it. The way that this guy orchestrates with his hand, for example, is very cool:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjF8JN5aVfc
Musicians like Imogen Heap, Chagall and even Ariana Grande have also succeeded where the music geeks failed. They’ve figured out how to use this technology as an interesting performance tool. And, just as importantly – they’ve figured out how to not look stupid doing it.
This new app Glover is interesting because it takes tech that music geeks failed to move forward and makes it accessible to musicians that can do something interesting with it.
When you make this tech available to any musician, you’ll it move beyond the ‘Subotnick in the 60s’ wannabees and see people doing creative things with it. It’s just like when synths escaped the universities and started getting into the hands of musicians – synths were suddenly everywhere and cool, because musicians were doing things with them that people could get into.
beyond wanking.. lmfao
“new app Glover is interesting because it takes tech that music geeks failed to move forward”
Please don’t be ridiculous. They could and they did use it even then, it just wasn’t mainstream. You’re talking about “entrepreneurs” and that’s all they are. “Entrepreneurs”. Anyway, it’s an old concept, time to move on.
I don’t like it, feels like I’m mowing the air.
waving your hand/arm in the air like that is the most unergonomical gesture you can make.
it makes you feel like your arm wants to fall off after 5 minutes.
Enjoy. /s
Folks,
It’s all in the musicality. Simple. Lyre’s, harps and flutes have been around since Ancient Greece! We don’t say, “well, that’s old technology. Forget about it! It’s just “Shampoo-rinse-repeat.”
I’m a tech guy, digital systems engineering, university of Texas. I have well over a decade as a consultant, and a lifetime as a musician. Believe me, it’s all in the application.
To say, “they are just entrepreneurs,” belies the point. Is a great musician just an entrepreneur for making their vocal chords and mouth formants uniquely expressed, to great pleasure? Hell no! We call them artists, creators.
Haters hate and entrepreneurs adapt, whatever the field. If you feel like you’ve got the td h down, try adapting it to some new good use. You might get rich. The Dyson vacuum and air movers are using Newtonian thermodynamics, for God’s sakes. Just an entrepreneur?
So, with the gloves. Try “adapter,” artist, musician, any word but “just anything. Da Vinci modeled an airplane 500-600 years ago. Yet the Wright Brother’s didn’t adapt until about 100 years ago, and Boeing, Hughes Aircraft, Douglass all the more recent, the last 80-90 years.
Go see an original DC-3, compare it to Da Vinci’s drawings, and tell me the DC-3 wasn’t an elegant adaptation of age-old principles!
More than anything, be bold. Dare. Don’t late haters tell you no. Who is Bob Moog? Go look him up. He harnessed all sorts of electrical and electronic features into modules, and made the first modular synthesizer, no onward. Listen to recordings that have Mellotron keys in them. Chamberlain advanced their organ to do what – each key engaged a tape-head to play a strip of tape with a recording of a certain pitch on a certain instrument – these were the first well-adapted samplers! Listen to Led Zeppelin. ‘Er, get the led out!
I mean all of this in life and humility. Life knocks one around some, and then we must adapt. Imagine bbq grills. Their inventors did not invent fire.
As someone whose been knocked around a lot by horrific pain, I encourage all, adapt! There is no “just an entrepreneur.” We all stand on the shoulders of giants, whether we know it or not.
All in Christ’s love,
Dean