In one of the newsletters I subscribe to, I saw the headline “E-textiles can be electronic musical instruments”* and clicked straight through as it mentions two areas I’m interested in. The article covered research from a place called Intelligent Instruments Lab (or IIL) out of the University of Iceland, and it turns out that IIL does some fascinating work if you like noise and music coming from unusual, unorthodox places.
To continue with the textiles point, the below YouTube playlist from the lab shows one way that the researchers make noise and is totally worth watching. It ends with the enticingly named video, “no input knitted mat improv 2024 03 19.”
This is just one thing the lab is working on, from “cello-like feedback instruments” to “magnetic controllers for neural audio synthesis,” and at the IIL website they talk about AI a lot. “Music is our research base, but our methodology is grounded in the experimental humanities,” the website reads. “We study creative AI from a broad humanities basis, involving musicians, computer scientists, philosophers and cognitive scientists in key international institutions.”
There’s a whole lot to dig into at the IIL website, so don’t let me hold you up.
Read more about the intersection of science and music here at the blog.
Photos: from the IIL website.
*Hat tip to Textile Technology Source.
