Scrape digital wand against surface and give texture to your voice

Washington : Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have invented a digital wand like instrument that allows people to give texture to their sound.

The system works something like this: The user has to record a voice and run the end of the wand against a texture — for example, a dish of glass marbles.

A sensor at the tip feels and measures the stimulation and sends the signal to a computer, which then imparts the desired texture to the voice.

According to its makers, rubbing the wand against sandpaper will make the voice gritty, while tapping it against glass and felt will make it glassy and fuzzy respectively.

“Take sandpaper. You can imagine what it might sound like to rub your finger across it. But what would it sound like to rub your voice against it? The voice will sound gritty. Tap it against glass and it sounds glassy. Rub it against felt and it sounds fuzzy," said co-inventor and MIT Ph.D. candidate Hayes Raffle.

According to David Merrill, MIT Ph.D. candidate who invented the device along with Raffle, the ‘Sound of Touch’ device will eventually be used by everyone from musicians and kids, to sound-designers and scientists — anyone interested in "painting" with sound.

"It's about sound and the kind of intuition people have about sound," he said.

"It reflects a natural and intuitive way of thinking about sound," added Michael Gurevich, a post-doctoral research scholar at Stanford University specializing in physical interaction design for music.

"You are taking a thing and going out in the world and probing it and tapping it the way you would a drum stick," Gurevich said.

According to Discovery News, the software builds on original work by Roberto Aimi, a MIT alumnus who invented hybrid digital instruments, merging recorded sound of the car engine with marbles.

Merrill and Raffle now plan to test the device's robustness at this years SIGGRAPH conference in August, where they expect thousands of attendants to scrape, rub, brush and tap the Sound of Touch to its limit. (ANI)