"Cyborg" Inventor Steve Mann Builds Instruments Out of Water
Posted by Michael_Byrne on Monday, May 03, 2010
In Episode 4 of Sound Builders, we travel to Toronto, Ontario to visit the amazing Steve Mann. While at MIT, where he earned a PhD in Media Arts & Sciences, Steve founded the Wearable Computers Group at the Media Lab, and built musical instruments using brainwaves and compressed hydraulic fluids. Lauded by some as the world’s first cyborg, and the initiator of the mobile blogging movement, Steve is now a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto.
For this episode, Steve volunteered to be both guest and host, using his human/cyborg first-person perspective to show us his studio, talk about his past inventions, and ask members of the circus to play the latest of his inventions: the hydraulophone, a highly tactile and mellifluous water-based instrument that Steve hopes can offer the blind and deaf a new method of music-creation.
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Michael covers physics, climate science, the future of music, and assorted things fallen through cracks at Motherboard. A native of Colorado, Michigan, and Oregon, he currently resides in Baltimore...
