Is This Guy A Human Drum Machine? Or Is This More Like Electroshock Therapy Gone Wrong?

By Adrian Covert Tue., Dec. 21 2010 at 12:55 PM

Categories: Freak Show, Tech, Video

Japanese artist/musician/tech Wizard Daito Manabe loves the intersection between music and technology -- this isn't his first experiment, after all. But this may be his weirdest yet, combining a drum machine -- one that's powered by human fingers and their electrical impulses -- with an electroshock audio visualizer, hooked up to a poor guy's face. The result appears to be either a deleted scene from A Clockwork Orange, or a psych ward treatment gone horribly wrong.

The clip pretty much shows it all, but essentially, Manabe has mapped a MIDI box with different drum sounds to each of his five fingers, so that when he makes contact with any human body part, it registers as a noise. Meanwhile, he has electroshock probes hooked up to the face muscles of his subject, which are also tapped into the same MIDI source. When he plays a different sound with his fingers, different parts of his face twitch in time with the sounds. It's awesome, but weird. Really weird, actually.

[via Gizmodo]

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