statusbar's Journal: Historic fun with alternative MIDI input devices

Many years ago in 1990, Bob Turner and I, Jeff Koftinoff, were working on alternative MIDI input devices at Simon Fraser University specifically for high level quadriplegics.

During our work at S.F.U., we came across a video for MIT Medialab's "The Digital Baton". In the video that we were shown, one person "conducted" a MIDI sequence playing on a computer with a large baton, while another person played along with a violin.

One of the projects that we designed at S.F.U. was called the "Kit-100", which was a small pressure sensitive touch pad which controlled any MIDI instrument. Bob Turner and I decided that we needed to make a video in response to MIT's. However, in our video, I would control the electronic pad with a tiny Q-tip instead of a large baton, and Bob would play a large bass violin instead of a tiny violin. Instead of a MIDI sequence, we would play improvised music.

Our video is posted at: http://www.turnercom.com/compositions-etc/Kit-100.html