From Xbox toy to stage instrument: Kinect, Imogen Heap’s gloves and the artists who played the room
A depth camera sold for living-room games became one of electronic music’s first full-body controllers. How Heap paired it with her gloves, who else hacked it into Ableton — and what it taught today’s hand-tracking, XR and brain-interface tools.
Ultraleap after the split: where Leap Motion hand tracking stands for musicians
The 2024 restructuring put the hand-tracking group up for sale. We map what still runs with Ableton, Max and TouchDesigner — and what to buy if you are starting now.
A brain–computer musical interface that keeps it minimal — on purpose
A new paper sonifies emotion from EEG in real time with a stripped-back rig. Why fewer electrodes might be the right call for performers.
Azure Kinect is gone. Orbbec’s Femto Bolt is the drop-in the installation crowd reached for
Microsoft handed the depth-sensing baton to partners in 2023. A practical migration note for body-tracking patches.
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ALL POSTS →Hands to MIDI: routing hand-tracking data into your DAW over OSC and MPE
Fingertip positions are just numbers. A step-by-step patch that smooths them, scales them and lands them as per-note expression in Live, Bitwig or Logic.
Headphones that listen back: reading Microsoft Research’s EEG attention work as a music tool
Decoding which musical line a listener attends to, from electrodes in a headphone form factor. What that could mean for adaptive mixes and live sets.
MiMU’s Glover, explained for Live and Logic users
The gloves get the photos; the mapping software does the work. Postures, orientation, drum hits and how to keep a gesture set you can actually remember on stage.
Forget the metaverse: headset hand tracking as a mixing surface in your real studio
Passthrough, floating faders and your actual monitors. Opinion: the useful XR music tools are the ones that stay in the room you already work in.
Low-cost EEG on a Raspberry Pi: what a hobby brain interface can really control
Boards like PiEEG put brain signals within reach of a Max patch. Blinks, jaw clenches and alpha waves — sorting reliable control from wishful mapping.
Microgestures: why finger-level tracking matters more to players than to gamers
Ultraleap’s Hyperion pushed tracking toward tiny thumb-and-finger moves. For musicians that is the difference between waving at a synth and playing it.
Environments — not just the metaverse
WHERE BODY-CONTROLLED MUSIC ACTUALLY HAPPENSLatency budgets, lighting that blinds sensors, and gesture sets you can perform under pressure.
Air gestures for filter sweeps and automation lanes, recorded straight into the DAW.
Depth sensors and radar turning visitors into performers — no headset required.
Headsets as one more environment — linked to real hardware, real DAWs and real rooms.