Sonic Artist Adriano Clemente Turns You and Pretty Much Everything Else Into A Musical Instrument
A recent episode of Motherboard’s show, Sound Builders showcased Brooklyn resident artist Adriano Clemente who uses biofeedback, contact microphones, and lasers to turn bodies, light, and every day objects into musical instruments.
In episode one, presented by Harman, we went to Bushwick to meet with Brooklyn-based interactive sound artist Adriano Clemente. He’s a DJ, hacker, gamer and music producer, but to sum things up, we’ve dubbed him a techno-collagist. It’s the most accurate description for Adriano, since he uses a multitude of existing technology and custom parts whose official purposes are hardly designed for making music.
We saw this firsthand when Samantha had her arm turned into an analog instrument. With strapping a medical sensor to Samantha’s forearm, Adriano was able to turn her muscle contractions into data to perform and compose music through biofeedback.
Adriano went on to explore the relationship between body, sensors, and sound by showing us how a piezo contact microphone can be used to transform any piece of backyard junk into a percussive and melodic instrument. Some people call it physical modeling synthesis, but we call it pretty much amazing.
Adriano’s objective is clear: to create a new kinesthetic approach to sound design that totally flips our notion that music is made from a traditional instrument, or from interfacing with your mouse, keyboard and screen.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
