Sound Builders: "Cyborg" Inventor Steve Mann Builds Instruments Out of Water
Posted by Motherboard on Monday, May 03, 2010
In Episode 4 of Sound Builders, we travel to Toronto, Ontario to visit the amazing Steve Mann. While at MIT, where he earned a PhD in Media Arts & Sciences, Steve founded the Wearable Computers Group at the Media Lab, and built musical instruments using brainwaves and compressed hydraulic fluids. Lauded by some as the world’s first cyborg, and the initiator of the mobile blogging movement, Steve is now a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto.
For this episode, Steve volunteered to be both guest and host, using his human/cyborg first-person perspective to show us his studio, talk about his past inventions, and ask members of the circus to play the latest of his inventions: the hydraulophone, a highly tactile and mellifluous water-based instrument that Steve hopes can offer the blind and deaf a new method of music-creation.
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Plucci 4 months ago
That's so awesome. Is it just me or does look like it has the head of a whale?
DeathFromAbove 4 months ago
This looks cool.. he would have well pruned fingers after a good session! kinky bastard
TheRealChipChester 4 months ago
Love that he sees this as a valuable addition to public parks. We should all have more music in our lives.
wood18 4 months ago
this instrument is crazy. if this guy can defy what physicist say, think of all the other boundaries to be broken down. id also like to look into those crazy "cyborg" glasses he invented.
HeyStranger 4 months ago
4:40 on definitely looks like the beginning of a low-budget fetish flick. Killer instrument though.
ChristopherR 4 months ago
Imagine how pruned the professional water organ player's fingers must get after a headlining water organ gig.
manheim 4 months ago
I love people that went to MIT, so interesting.
plumsbird 4 months ago
that hot tub looks nice.
Orion 4 months ago
If my instrument was also a hot tub practice would be much more enjoyable.
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