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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.
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.