Monday, February 11, 2008

Local firms strum the chords of real music innovation

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

Technology out of the MIT Media Lab, via Cambridge-based Harmonix Inc.'s Guitar Hero and Rock Band games, has turned a generation of gamers into musician wannabes.

But for real musicians -- those who actually play instruments -- New England's technology contribution to music goes far beyond gaming, and includes cutting-edge technologies such as accelerometers, nanomaterials and advanced digital signal processing.

In Woburn, Source Audio LLC is using accelerometers and wireless technologies to help guitar players get new sounds from their instruments. The company's device, dubbed the Hot Hand, is a wireless device, worn like a ring on the player's strumming hand. Using the motion of the ring, the player can control guitar effects traditionally manipulated by foot pedals, such as a phaser, a flanger or a wah-wah pedal.

While novel, the device is more than a toy. It is steeped in technology and aimed at professional sound quality, said Source Audio president Roger Smith.

Source Audio was founded in 2005 by Smith and vice president of engineering Jesse Remignanti, both longtime engineers at Norwood's Analog Devices Inc. The two were joined by chief scientist Robert Chidlaw, who for 20 years worked in various roles, including chief scientist, at California-based Kurzweil Music Systems, responsible for creating the first "true sounding" electric pianos, according to Smith.

The recipient of two patents in digital signal processing from his days at Kurzweil, Chidlaw is the sound guru of the group, responsible for making the company's products suitable for professional musicians, as well as hobbyists.

"We've begun to transition from being an oddity to something that people will use on a regular basis," he said, citing a recent industry trade show that saw the device used on stage by a number of professional guitar players, including Herman Li of the band Dragon Force and Chuck Garvery of the band Moe.

In Ashland, two former Boston Scientific Corp. engineers are applying their knowledge to music. SoundWave Research Laboratories Inc., founded by engineers Robert Crowley and Hugh Tripp, is applying a patented nanostructure material to studio-quality recording microphones.

"The problems in ribbon microphones has always been signal purity and output level, and this material can improve both by orders of magnitude -- particularly now that computers are used for recording more often than tape," said Crowley.

SoundWave's acoustic materials, the newest of which is called Rosewellite, uses carbon nanotubes and other, proprietary nanomaterials for precision sound reproduction, Crowley said.

But just as it can reproduce a vocalist, it can also be used for acoustic imaging in medical devices. When Crowley and Tripp founded the company in 2004, they built it in two divisions -- one for studio recording and one for medical applications.

The melding of technology and musicianship is a natural progression, according to Crowley, who, along with Tripp, is a musician as well as an engineer. Inventors and entrepreneurs are creative folks, he said, and it is only natural for them to eventually apply their technical knowledge to their artistic passions.

"Technology people are the kinds of people that have the vision for these kinds of technologies and knowledge to make them happen," he said.

Recent stories on local sound and music technologies, include this story on audio and speaker tech and this story on new tech at the Berklee College of Music.