Imagine a rock concert in which the band makes music not with guitars or drums or electric violins, but with computers. John, Paul, George and Ringo take their places behind a bank of flat-screen monitors. As they click mice and pound on their QWERTY keyboards, “A Hard Day’s Night” fills the air. It sounds like the Beatles, but it doesn’t look like much.
Enter the Accordiatron, a computer-controlled device that bridges the gap between computer-generated music and the art of performance.
Michael Gurevich, a graduate student at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, and Stephan von Muehlen, who earned an MFA last year in product design, invented the Accordiatron in a 2001 course on human-computer interaction. Although people have been making music with computers for decades, Gurevich says, live audiences don’t find the standard monitor-keyboard-mouse setup very satisfying. “There’s no correlation between gestures and sound,” Gurevich explains. The Accordiatron, like a musical instrument, gives an audience something to connect to.
But it’s no conventional instrument. Unconnected to a computer, the Accordiatron—an accordion-meets-iMac tangle of wires and circuitry and neon-orange acrylic—is strangely silent. Plug it in, however, and a musician can make it sound like almost anything.
For example, let’s say Paul is the most computer-savvy Beatle. Using software, he assigns various sounds—guitar riffs, drum beats, piano notes—to the Accordiatron’s buttons. Pitch and tone are controlled by several sensors that detect movement. As soon as Paul straps the Accordiatron to his hands, the computer translates his movement and button-pressing into sound.
Why make it look like an accordion? Gurevich says the inventors appreciated its visual appeal, diversity of sound and range of movement. He concedes there may not be much of a commercial market for the Accordiatron. But it did earn him an A+.
