University composers to showcase invented instruments at international music festival

Three composers from the University of Plymouth are to perform at a prestigious Italian music festival with a set of newly-fashioned instruments. The instruments are shaped like sculptures – a fitting design for a concert in the homeland of Michelango, Donatello and Leonardo da Vinci – albeit with a rather more contemporary style, and fitted with sensors that connect to a synthesiser. The designers – Antonino Chiaramonte, Anna Troisi and Professor Eduardo Miranda – ‘play’ notes by running their fingers over the sensors, and can even change the sound quality by subtly turning and moving the whole structure. The signals are then relayed to the synthesiser which produces the music. The instruments are part of the Electroshop project at the University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research. They are hand-crafted from a conductive mesh metal, and took eight months to design and build. Professor Miranda said: “Synthesisers were invented in the 1950s and the industry adopted the keyboard as its method of input.