New device turns hand gestures into music

US researchers have developed a unique electronic instrument that translates hand gestures into music.
Researchers from Cornell University developed the instrument, called 'Aura'. To play the Aura, users have to wear gloves fitted with sensors that report the position and orientation of their hands in a magnetic field.
Raising and lowering the hands controls pitch; spreading them apart increases volume, researchers said.
Closing the fingers activates flex sensors and muffles the sound, and twisting the hands adds distortion, said engineering student Ray Li.
Through an interface created by programmer Michael Ndubuisi, also from Cornell, hand positions are converted to signals in the universal Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) language for electronic instruments and fed to a synthesiser.

The result looks something like a person listening to music and pretending to conduct, but this 'conductor' is more like a wizard conjuring music out of thin air, Li said.
"We're trying to capture those intuitive gestures and make music," Li explained.
The magnetic sensors were lent by Ascension Technology Corporation of Vermont, which developed them for medical applications, motion tracking and manipulation of 3-D graphics.