• AutoTL;DRB
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    21 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Minutes later, the two men were hunched over the instrument flanked by five bodyguards, as Meeks moved the blind musician’s thumbs and forefingers across the fretboard to demonstrate how to play.

    But a decade’s worth of harpejji performances by Wonder – plus support from Jacob Collier, Harry Connick Jr and jazz producer Cory Henry – have changed that.

    Queen Mary University and Imperial College London jointly run The Augmented Instruments Laboratory, where researcher Lia Mice has developed, among other things, a one-handed violin (designed for people with disabilities) and chaos bells – a 4 sq metre frame of steel tubes that the player touches, tilts and strikes to produce a cacophonous metallic feedback loop.

    There is even a gold-standard annual contest for inventors: the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, run by the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

    “For many musicians, making music happens by typing lines of code or creating sounds on a DAW [digital audio workstation, such as GarageBand],” he says.

    The harpejji, meanwhile, is on course to exceed $1m of sales in 2023 – a record year – and Marcodi Musical Products recently moved to bigger premises near Baltimore.


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