Imogen Heap is one of those musicians who has long embraced tech, and now she's giving you a chance to get your hands on her musical gloves. Invented in 2011 by Heap and Thomas Mitchell, the gloves are called Mi.Mu, and they allow you to make some very unique music just by gesticulating.
Until now, Mi.Mu have existed exclusively on Ms. Heap's hands, but her tech folks have refined them enough to be sold to the public. The gloves track your hand movements, recognize specific postures, and can detect the speed of the gestures you're making. They can even be used in tandem to create new two-hand specific sound queues. The gloves flash lights and vibrate to give you a tactile sense of your music, and they're compatible with pretty much any music studio software that can interface with MIDI or Open Sound Control. You can even customize your Mi.Mu gloves so that the sounds you make and the way you use them is totally unique to you.
It's a pretty cool idea, all in all, but getting your hands in a pair of these is going to take a commitment. As of the writing of this article, all of the differing Mi.Mu kits available via Kickstarter are still on offer, but they're all a bit pricey. For $1,260 you can pick up a DIY kit version of a single glove, or you can splurge for the ready-made pair for a staggering $4,036. It's a lot of dough, but then again it's a musical instrument and some pricey software bundled together, so if you're a musician looking for a cool new way to express yourself, maybe snap a pair of these puppies up.
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