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Students invent the human synthesizer that gets toes tapping
Mark Prigg, Science and Technology Editor18 Aug 2009
A human synthesizer that can be played by people touching hands has been unveiled by London students.
The team from the Royal College of Art have worked with musician Calvin Harris to recreate one of his songs using 15 dancers to play every instrument.
Dancers had their hands and feet coated in conductive ink invented by the students, and triggered musical samples by jumping on ink spots on the floor, or by touching hands with each other.
In the video of the project, dubbed a "Humanthesizer", Harris, pictured below, is able to play a "people piano" by slapping the dancers' hands to trigger sounds.
The video took more than a month to develop, and was based on the conductive ink developed by the RCA students as part of their graduation show. It has already received more than 400,000 hits on YouTube.
"We saw this conductive ink, and realised it could be used to play music," said Steve Milbourne of Sony Music, who developed the system with Columbia, Harris's record company. "We spent around a month designing the system, and testing everything so it worked. It then took us three days to rehearse, and a day to actually shoot the video. We used professional dancers, as they had to be able to keep in time, and two were pianos, two drums, and three created bass sounds."
In addition, eight dancers each acted as a piano note.
To play the synthesizer, a person with the conductive paint on their hands and feet stands on one of the spots - connected by a wire to a computer.
When the person stands on the spot, or touches another person, the computer registers the electric charge and triggers the samples which form the music.
"It was quite difficult technically, and definitely a bit of a crazy idea that gave us some sleepless nights," said Mr Milbourne.
"However, it was definitely worth it - it's been a huge success, and was the favourite video on YouTube last week."
The students have created a company to commercialise the technology and hope to create other dance projects based on it.
