A musical Lady’s glove

Its amazing how technology was so advanced back in 1991. Laetitia Sonami, a composer, performer and sound installation artist created a sensory enhanced glove during this time for the at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. This Lady’s glove could be the first of its kind featuring integrated sensors on such an advanced level for the use as musical performance enhancing instrument. It got a major upgrade in 1994 by from Bert Bongers to enhance the look and performance of the glove and was called the Lady’s glove 2.

This new glove has five Hall effect transducers glued at the tip of the fingers and a magnet on the right hand: by touching the fingers on the magnet, signals were generated and fed to a electronic which converted them to MIDI signals. Some resistive strips inspired by an early gaming glove by Mattel, the Power glove for Nintendo NES, are sewn along the fingers and wrist to generate streams of data when bent. A pressure pad sewn on the inside of the index finger and an ultrasonic transmitter inside the palm, with one receiver located on the right arm and one on the left foot. This setup calculates the distance between both hands and the height of the left hand. Some additional sensors of the Lady’s Glove include five micro switches, a mercury switch on the top of the hand and an accelerometer which measuring the speed of motion of the hand. The signals from all these sensors are send to STEIM’s Sensor lab which conditions them and convert the signals into MIDI format to feed into various synthesizers and samplers. This is exactly what I am talking about. This is technology back in the 90’s. Amazing eh?

[Talk2myshirt]