There’s nothing more annoying than being in the vicinity of an air guitarist. And there’s nothing more fun than being that air guitarist. Well, now there is. If you’ve got a cell phone with an accelerometer — and so many new ones do — you’re set to take air guitar (and air drum, and air piano) to a new, crazy level. With a new program, your motion-sensitive cell phone will actually produce the sound of these musical instruments.
Want to bang out some beats? Or make your guitar gently weep? Or tickle the ivories? Your solution is called ZoozBeats, and has been developed by the mad scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology. ZoozBeats “is a gesture-based mobile musical studio, simple enough for non-musicians to immediately become musically expressive, but rich enough for experienced musicians to push the envelope of mobile music creation,” and it doesn’t just need an accelerometer, even though that’s the most popular way to detect motion. ZoozBeats can even use your phone’s camera to detect sudden movements and play an appropriate sound.
When you play with ZoozBeats, the probability of you creating actual music is actually very, very low. While you play with it, you’ll most likely create a cacophony unpleasant enough to drive your neighbours away — which may or may not be a good thing, now that we think of it. And you’ll look pretty silly — get a preview of this silliness at http://www. zoozmobile.com/beat/.