String-less Guitar that makes Music from Thin Air

09 Dec, 2015

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Music-tech start up company from London, Kurv, which was founded in 2014, built a virtual guitar that allows people to create the sounds of an actual guitar with the palm of their hands. This sensor-packed button pad recongizes the user's strumming patterns which in turn, simulates a real guitar. The developers claim that anyone who has never picked up a real guitar could easily learn in a matter of minutes.

Mr. Mick Grierson, co-founder of Kurv and Reader at Goldsmiths Department of Computing commented that for the first time, we're able to run advanced music synthesis engines on mobile phones. When combining this power with wearable technologies and machine learning, researchers can develop new musical instruments that were considered science fiction only a few years ago.

"What we've done is take a whole bunch of different sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, pressure sensitive stuff; and then combine that with a mobile phone which has the computational power to actually drive real-time music synthesis," Kurv co-founder Suran Goonatilake told Reuters. "And then (we) combined that with another bunch of technologies, in this case machine learning, to really understand your gestures. So it's kind of combining a whole bunch of different technologies with music knowledge, and that's how the Kurv has come about," Goonatilake said.

Kurv Guitar was launched on Kickstarter with a starting price of $185. The patent-pending prototype is currently being tested, but the developers hope early adopters will take the technology to new levels. The company is also releasing a software development kit to give users the power to create new musical instruments using the Kurv, mentioned by Reuters.

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