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Interface-Off

For 30 years, Michel Waisvisz and his touchy-feely electronic instruments have been considered oddities. If they turn out to be the future of interface design, will the rest of the world finally listen up?

By Matt Steinglass

Although he designs electronic music interfaces, Michel Waisvisz works in a classical music paradigm: he's a virtuoso. Techno music doesn't work that way. In techno, the audience is its own center.
(photo: Kristine Larsen)

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It's a rainy December night in Amsterdam, and inside the Frascati, a modernized theater in a converted Victorian tobacco emporium, an electronic music event called "Touch" is in progress. An audience of several hundred electronic musicians, digital artists, and other techno-aesthetes has gathered for a sort of twisted chamber-music concert. Renowned contemporary cellist Frances Marie Uitti is deploying her signature technique: playing with two bows simultaneously. Of the two musicians on stage, though, Uitti is the more conventional.

Her duet partner is a powerfully built man in a black T-shirt, wearing a pair of paw-like metal contraptions on his hands. Thick wires trail from his wrists to a pack on his belt, which is connected to a computer that is connected, in turn, to a mixing board and an array of synthesizers and samplers. As Uitti misuses her instrument, the man extends one of his gaunt-lets, from which a small microphone protrudes. A moment later, a sample of the noise Uitti just played ricochets back through the loudspeakers. The man begins fluttering his fingers, playing the pair of small keypads contained in his devices, and waving his arms like a conductor. The sampled cello sound comes pinging back in a range of pitches, recombined with other samples. The cellist and the cyborg segue into a frenzied improv session of Bartók-like melodies, scraping and banging sounds, percussion samples, and the occasional barking of a dog.

The man with the machine-tooled hands is Michel Waisvisz, director of Amsterdam's Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, or STEIM. Since the late 1960s, Waisvisz has been building novel, sometimes bizarre electronic musical instruments for live performance. Waisvisz's instruments are made to be held, waved around, tugged, and jabbed at; above all, they're made to be played expressively. In the field of electronic music, where most instruments are steel boxes controlled by buttons, knobs, and computer software, Waisvisz's commitment to creating hands-on performative machines has long made him a bit of an eccentric figure.

But over the past few years, that's begun to change. New rumblings are emanating from the electronic music community. Dissatisfied with their buttons and knobs, many digital musicians want computerized musical instruments that have the fluidity, the immediacy, and the humanity of traditional instruments. They're tired of sitting behind their PCs, composing music with software sequencers; they want to pick up their instruments and play.

At the same time, a new generation of computer scientists has become interested in the problem of teaching computers to respond to human gestures. At places like the MIT Media Lab, researchers are building sensors and software to allow computers to track and understand vocal inflections, facial expressions, and the nuanced movements of musical performers.

As these two trends converge, an unlikely coalition of people from widely diverse fields is forming. The participants at Touch include musicians, computer scientists and interface designers, choreographers, high-tech trend-spotters from Palo Alto's Interval Research Corporation, jugglers, philosophy professors, puppeteers, avant-garde electronic composers, cognitive psychologists, and a contingent of techno music--loving French art students with green hair and rave gear. These people speak a dialect half engineer ("haptic interface"), half music teacher ("finger memory"). The concern that unites them: How do you build computer interfaces--specifically, electronic instruments--that have the sensitivity, grace, and expressivity of, say, a cello?

It seems that Michel Waisvisz has found his audience.

The week before Touch, I meet Waisvisz at a café on the River Amstel, around the corner from the twin seventeenth-century canal houses where STEIM's headquarters are located. A short, dark-haired man in his late forties with a thick neck and an imposing, squarish head, Waisvisz does indeed look like someone who works with his hands, but in a more traditional capacity--as a bricklayer, maybe. His gentle, courteous voice comes as a surprise. There's a mismatch between the instrument and its sound, not unlike hearing the voice of a cello coming from a metal glove. Waisvisz has a bit of the Sixties rebel about him. He likes to issue sweeping proclamations, and one of his favorites is that keyboards are a terrible interface for playing electronic music.

"The keyboard was designed for playing nineteenth-century classical music," he says, with the sly smile of someone trying not to insult another branch of his profession. "It is tied to a system of notation based entirely on pitch and rhythm. But in electronic music, in fact in most music today, melody is not central. It is sound--timbre--that is central."

Anyone who's spent time listening to avant-garde electronic music, or to popular dance music for that matter, knows what Waisvisz means. Ever since the Fifties, electronic music has been largely concerned with two things: finding new sounds and appropriating sounds that weren't previously considered musical. The great modern composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's electronic pieces of the 1950s are an example of the former: they were created by recording sine-wave generators directly onto magnetic tape. Pierre Henry, one of the creators of "musique concrète," pursued the latter trend with works such as his 1963 Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir, composed entirely of creaking doors and sighs. Today, this obsession with sound permeates not just "serious" electronic music, but techno, house, and ambient music. "Sound comes first, then comes rhythm, and then comes pitch," Waisvisz says. "The priority has changed."

The keyboard is the perfect interface for representing pitch, because each key equals one pitch. But it has no way of representing timbre--what a sound sounds like. An electronic keyboardist who wants to switch from producing a sine-wave noise to a sampled door creak has to press arbitrarily labeled buttons and knobs on the top of the keyboard. This feels complicated to the performer, and is completely incomprehensible to observers, who are left wondering where the sounds are coming from. "When you pluck a [violin] string, it's something that a person can intuitively grasp," Waisvisz says. "Whereas pushing a button, you never know. The button could turn on the light, it could ring a bell--it could even blow up Russia."

In electronic music, Waisvisz goes on, "there is a decoupling of the controller and the controlled." What is lost is the performer's connection to the sound--the violinist's microscopic sensitivity to the vibrations under his fingertips. It is the sense of touch.

Waisvisz has been trying to get in touch with electronic sounds ever since he was a child, growing up in the Netherlands in the 1950s. Because his father was an avid ham radio hobbyist, he says, "there were all these beautiful shortwave sounds in the house, like telex sounds and codes, and all these foreign voices." He began building electronic instruments out of spare parts his father had lying around, and by the time he was 14, he was playing his own instruments in local concerts, which wasn't as strange as it might have been, given the context. "It was in the period when you would have happenings going on. You know, this was the Sixties."

It was a good time to be interested in electronic music. By then, the movement that began in the late 1940s in Paris with the musique concrète school of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, and in Cologne, with Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, had spread across Europe to places like Utrecht's Institute of Sonology. More and more electronic composers were becoming interested in live performance. Stockhausen was moving away from his early work, which had been created directly on tape, and was composing performance pieces like Mikrophonie I, in which sounds made with a Chinese gong were amplified by performers with microphones.

In 1968, the teenage Michel Waisvisz became involved with a half-dozen Dutch composers who were staging an electronic opera, Reconstruction, which they described as an "anti-imperialist morality play." Afterwards, they hung on to the equipment they had amassed; they rented a studio and established STEIM.

Amsterdam was much like anyplace else in the late Sixties, only slightly more so. A radical yippie-style party called the Provos had gained a seat on the city council. A burgeoning squatter movement was taking over unused buildings, establishing communes, and clashing with police. And at STEIM, composers were turning hardware issues into political arguments: Should each performer be free to determine his or her own volume level autonomously? Was a central mixing board inherently authoritarian?

Even in this carnivalesque atmosphere, the young Waisvisz must have seemed a bit of an odd bird. A 1969 photo shows him seated in the harness of something called the "Tapeloopswing"--a kind of giant, jury-rigged tape recorder--holding on to a pair of long loops of tape that encircle his body. He appears to be manually pulling the loops back and forth through two tape-recorder play heads that have been extended several feet out of the machines, while his feet manipulate a pair of volume pedals.

By the mid-1970s, though, STEIM had become a serious creative institute, with its own building and hardware-development resources, dozens of participating musicians, and a state-financed budget. STEIM's founders, people like Louis Andriessen and Konrad Boehmer, were now some of the most important composers in the Netherlands. Most of them had been classically trained, and they were turning back towards traditional instruments, so Waisvisz assumed a leading role at the institute. He had by this time developed a new strategy, which he called the "Crackle" approach. It involved controlling synthesizers by directly touching the circuits to alter their conductivity--in other words, sticking your fingers in the wires. STEIM soon began producing a little handheld synthesizer called the "Cracklebox," which featured exposed conducting surfaces; users could produce screeches, pops, and warbles by wiggling their fingers along the copper lines. It was a seductive toy, and STEIM eventually sold 5,000 of them.

The Cracklebox exemplified STEIM's philosophy: it was light, cheap, and highly tactile, and it had a sense of humor. But the electronic music world was gradually being influenced by something entirely new: the computer. And it was far from clear to Waisvisz how to bring STEIM's iconoclastic, fingers-in-the-wires approach into the digital age.

Ever since the 1960s, STEIM had maintained a principled commitment to live performance that set it apart from the rest of the electronic music world. "At the time, most people were trying to avoid the stage where the composer's idea has to pass through a musician," Waisvisz says. "So a lot of composers were very happy about the idea of working with the computer, because they thought you would be able to put in the formula, and the loudspeaker would just produce the music."

This kind of thinking goes back to the 1950s. In 1959, when the composer Milton Babbitt began working with the RCA Mark II Synthesizer at Columbia--a machine that occupied nearly an entire room, and was programmed with hole-punch paper drives--he was motivated by the desire to hear his music "exactly as it was conceived." In the Seventies, this composer-centric attitude received a big boost with the advent of an institution that became the leviathan of the electronic music world: the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique Musique in Paris, or IRCAM.

IRCAM opened in 1977, under the direction of Pierre Boulez, one of the pioneer electronic composers in the 1950s, who had gone on to become musical director of the New York Philharmonic. Over the years, IRCAM has come to represent a kind of anti-STEIM. It has a state-funded budget of tens of millions of dollars a year, while STEIM's budget amounts to perhaps one-fiftieth of that. IRCAM is housed in a vast four-story underground complex next to the Centre Pompidou; STEIM is housed in two modest old Amsterdam canal houses. But most important, under Boulez IRCAM epitomized the philosophy of authoritarian composer control, which meant computers were used to eliminate the unpredictability of performers.

In the early 1980s, Boulez was composing massive works like Repons, using traditional instrumentalists with live processing by IRCAM's elaborate 4X computer system--so expensive that only an institution like IRCAM could afford one. Waisvisz found this kind of project stifling. If electronic music required huge capital investments, what room would there be for maverick do-it-yourselfers?

But in 1983 the world of electronic music was revolutionized by the invention of a standard language for musical information: MIDI. MIDI allowed keyboards and computers to talk to one another; you could now plug your Yamaha DX7 into your Macintosh and, potentially, outperform IRCAM. This made computerized music accessible, for the first time, to the masses.

MIDI is essentially a protocol, a way of organizing digital information; it's analogous to TCP/IP, which dictates how all information traveling on the Internet is organized. It was designed with keyboards in mind: When a musician hits a key, the keyboard sends out two kinds of data, one for pitch (which note was struck) and another for velocity (how hard it was struck). In principle, though, any instrument or sensor could generate MIDI signals; you could have a sensor that measures how hard you squeeze a rubber ball, for example.

This aspect of MIDI fascinated Waisvisz, who welcomed the opportunity to link computers and synthesizers, but still longed for an instrument with a sense of touch. "Most of those keyboards were really crude," he says. "It was just like light switches, either on or off. If you look at the violin, you control more than 1,000 parameters--with your hands, with your fingers, the pressure, the angle of your bow. With synthesizers, you control maybe three at a time. I was looking for an instrument that would, with simple, intuitive motions, allow me to control a large number of parameters."

The result of this quest was the "Hands," which Waisvisz first built in 1984. (The version he played at Touch is actually "Hands II," built in 1989 and upgraded since.) The Hands have small keys suspended in front of Waisvisz's fingers, 12 for each hand; they also have sonar range finders that detect their positions relative to each other, tilt switches that monitor their angles, and an array of other sensors. The Hands are what are known as alternative MIDI controllers, meaning they produce MIDI signals but are not based on the design of a traditional musical instrument.

Today, there are dozens of such instruments, and for the people who make them, Waisvisz is an inspirational figure. Zbigniew Karkowski is a member of the globe-trotting alternative-controller trio Sensorband, whose instruments incorporate infrared beams, sonar sensors, biosensors like electromyographs (EMGs), which detect muscle tension, and a 30-foot-high MIDI-fied jungle gym called the Soundnet. "Before we started Sensorband, the only person in the world I knew who made music this way was Michel Waisvisz," he says.

Waisvisz thinks the Hands may have been the first alternative MIDI controller. "I did a big performance in [Amsterdam's] Concertgebouw [concert hall] in 1984, and according to some people that was the first concert ever with an alternative MIDI controller. Of course, I would call it an authentic MIDI controller. I think the keyboard is the alternative MIDI controller. Because it's descended from the church organ, it wasn't intended for MIDI at all."

Suddenly Waisvisz smiles, and begins to laugh. "I like that idea, actually. To swap the thing, to see the keyboard as an alternative controller." He's looking a bit more like the boy in the Tapeloopswing photo. "I never said that before. It just came out. I like it!" Across the café, a dog has begun barking frenetically, and Waisvisz looks over, entranced by the noise. "Wow, that really sounds amazing."

For all Waisvisz's criticism of keyboards, there is a reason they were the first instruments to be computerized: They involve very limited data. Other instruments are much, much harder to encode. In the late 1980s, when commercial manufacturers began designing MIDI guitars, violins, and wind instruments, they found that their machines were missing huge chunks of information: the way a guitarist's pick strikes the string; the little squeaks a violinist employs for emphasis; the intimate lip buzz of a sax player going mellow. "It is generally accepted," MIT Media Lab researcher Joseph Paradiso wrote in a 1997 article in the journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, "that the MIDI standard cannot handle the wealth of data that stringed instruments, including guitars, can produce."

The Media Lab is the world's preeminent center for interface research, so it's not surprising that people there are interested in musical interface design as well. In the mid-1980s, while Waisvisz was trying to build a MIDI interface with the character and sensitivity of a violin, Media Lab professor Tod Machover was working to build a cello with the computerized power of MIDI.

A cellist himself, Machover knew that capturing a cello performance in MIDI would be extremely hard to do; you would have to monitor things like the angle of the bow and the force with which the cellist thrusts it against the strings. He began adding all sorts of sensors, including sonar sensors and accelerometers for the cellist's wrist. The instrument he came up with was not simply a MIDI-capable cello; it was something more. Machover christened it the "Hypercello."

By the mid-1990s, Machover, Paradiso, who was designing wireless violin bow trackers and musical radar, and others at MIT developed a collection of new instruments, using a whole array of sensors and interfaces, for a project called the "Brain Opera." Machover's showpiece was the Sensor Chair, a MIDI throne that used electric field sensors to detect a performer's gestures. Another Brain Opera instrument was Teresa Marrin's Digital Baton, which used infrared signals, pressure sensors, and accelerometers to read a conductor's gestures, and transmitted them by infrared beam to a computer that generated the music.

The Brain Opera was a tremendous showcase for alternative musical interfaces, but the instruments had their share of problems. Marrin, for example, was not entirely satisfied with her baton, mostly because she had difficulty with the "mapping." Mapping--the task of telling the computer how to respond to the performer's gestures--is hard to do in a way that feels intuitive, and especially in a way that's recognizable to an audience. The programs she wrote for the Digital Baton interpreted the space in front of the performer as a two-dimensional grid. Moving in and out of the cells of the grid triggered various musical events. "This confused people," she says, "because they couldn't see the virtual grid, so they didn't connect the actions of the performer with the sounds that they heard."

To get a better sense of how to map sounds to gestures, Marrin developed a research project with affective computing specialist Rosalind Picard. (Affective computing is the phrase MIT uses to describe the sensors and software that allow computers to recognize physical displays of emotion--smiles, angry gestures, and vocal strain, for example.) Together, Marrin and Picard built a "Conductor's Jacket" outfitted with EMG sensors that measure tension in a performer's limbs, as well as sensors that monitor respiration, temperature, heart rate, and electrical conductivity in the skin. When they put the jacket on a conductor during rehearsals, they found, for example, that he increased the tension in his muscles to indicate volume and intensity, and that he would abruptly let his muscles go limp just before signaling a major event, as a kind of heads-up gesture.

Marrin and Picard's research is the sort of thing that fires the imagination of the people at Touch. In the three-day symposium preceding the festival, the connections they draw between physicality, perception, and art are sometimes inspired, sometimes tenuous. The talk ranges from psychoacoustics and "embodied cognition" to NASA robots that write their own software, the navigation skills of Polynesian aborigines, and the way that European culture has traditionally privileged the visual over the tactile. Most of the speakers are in their mid-thirties or older; many of them hold academic positions. Finally, at the end of the last question period, a 20-year-old girl with a shock of platinum hair and a pierced eyebrow gets up to speak.

"I think you guys really ought to, like, check some stuff out," she begins. She rambles on for several minutes, mentioning friends of hers who make techno music by smashing and re-gluing vinyl records, and a number of other things apparently connected only by the proposition that they all seem cool to her. The mood in the room shifts from embarrassment to amused affection. Then, gradually, it begins to seem that she has a point.

Electronic music is no longer avant-garde. For anyone who grew up with rave culture, electronic music is popular music. If you are going to talk about the aesthetics of digital performance, there are some people who ought to be in on the conversation, and they're not holding academic seminars in quaint little theaters like the Frascati.

Two miles south of the Frascati, at the RAI conference center, deejay Luke Slater is in the cockpit on Stage 2. Green lasers stream over his head, and 2,000 drug-enhanced techno enthusiasts thrash about on the concrete floor below him. This is "Innercity," billed as the world's largest indoor dance party. There are 25,000 electronica fans roaming from stage to stage in the airplane hangar--size halls, past 50-foot-high video screens, half-naked go-go dancers on glowing plastic towers, a booth dispensing safety tips for drug use, and a functioning Tilt-a-Whirl.

Slater, a smooth-pated Londoner, is one of the headline acts. His "epic techno" album Freek Funk went to the top of the dance charts last year. "Lately I've come under the heading 'thrash techno,' " he says over the phone from England, two weeks after Innercity. He's just returned from Australia, and is about to head to Scotland. The international deejay circuit is big business.

Slater's usual performance is just deejaying, but he also stages "live" performances, bringing along his entire studio setup, synths and samplers included, and playing them with a band.

His music is resolutely electronic. The beats are generally synthetic, not sampled loops of live drummers. The melodic sounds are synthesizer tones, rather than samples of conventional instruments. When he does use sampled sounds, he usually alters them beyond recognition. The crowd at Innercity likes his stuff; on the packed bleachers surrounding the dance floor, fans are leaning over the railings, peering through the smoke toward the stage, hanging on Slater's every move.

But what is it, exactly, that they're looking at? Slater's head is just visible on stage; you can barely see him switching records, pressing mysterious buttons, and occasionally putting on or removing his headphones. It looks very much like a Stockhausen concert, circa 1960--apart from the lasers. This is exactly the kind of disembodied performance that people like Waisvisz and Marrin are trying to get away from.

Does Slater care what the audience sees on stage? Does it matter whether they can tell what he's doing? "If I'm having a good time doing it, and if I get off on what I do, that's the best I can do," he says.

Most techno musicians share this disregard for what the audience sees. "It's important, when you do a performance, that people dance, and not that people watch," says Jorgen Brinkman, a member of the Dutch trance-techno duo Seven Seas. Brink-man's attitude is all the more telling because he may be the only techno musician in the world using an alternative MIDI controller designed by Michel Waisvisz.

Brinkman and his partner, Mark Paping, use the "Web," an interface Waisvisz first built in 1993. (Hence its unfortunate name--the World Wide Web didn't exist yet.) The Web is a set of 16 cables stretched over an aluminum frame; when the performer tugs at the strings, they emit MIDI signals. It's a unique interface because, as Paping says, "once you've stretched a string, you have to hold it perfectly steady in order not to send a signal." This is essentially impossible to do, so music made with the Web is constantly moving and shifting.

Brinkman and Paping's trance-techno performance was enthusiastically received at Touch, particularly by the French art-student contingent. As the only techno musicians to perform there, they provided a stark contrast to Waisvisz, Marrin, and the other, more physical, performers. Waisvisz and Marrin work in the European classical music paradigm: they're virtuosos. They play, the audience watches and enthuses.

Waisvisz himself finds most techno, with its focus on repetitive loops, rather boring, but it may, in fact, represent the future of electronic music. Of course, techno is dance music, so it's probably not fair to compare it with Waisvisz's music, which is more like jazz. But leaving aside the question of whether audiences want to watch alternative interfaces, there remains the question of just how many musicians actually want to play them. No one, not even STEIM, has ever marketed an alternative MIDI controller to a mass audience. Unless you count the I-Cube.

Axel Mulder is the founder and president of Infusion Systems, makers of the I-Cube. Mulder started out in the academic interface-engineering world, but in 1995 he decided to take his work commercial. He wanted to build an alternative MIDI interface system that was cheap and accessible to a broad range of performers.

The I-Cube is not a single interface. It's a system for hooking up sensors and turning the signals into MIDI. The sensors are sold separately, as accessories. The basic system costs less than a thousand dollars, and the sensors go for a couple of hundred a pop. Mulder says sales are "in the hundreds," which is not unreasonable for an instrument most people don't even have a conceptual category for.

Mulder thinks "the technology has to get much cheaper" before the I-Cube will catch on with a mass audience, but the main obstacle is not the cost--it's the mental leap it takes just to think about working with these kinds of instruments. It's hard to believe that millions of people will take to configuring sensors and mapping gestures in the way that they take to playing electric guitar.

Waisvisz, however, feels it's misguided to even consider pursuing such a goal. "Taking part in the design of electronic instruments should be part of the artist's work," he says. "Anyway, it's a misconception that traditional instruments are a fixed thing. If you look at the changes that even the grand piano underwent from, say, 1830, there's an incredible amount of invention. Today, for sales, they've fixed the grand piano into a set product, but that's only since mass production."

Waisvisz's crusade against standardized instruments notwithstanding, if alternative interfaces do find a mass audience, it will be because techno musicians ove playing with new toys. Even Luke Slater has caught the bug. "A friend of mine has one of these infrared-beam jobs," he says. "By putting your hand in the beam, you control the MIDI. I think that's really cool. I'm thinking of getting one of those." It's not so surprising: Slater's childhood musical efforts involved taking apart tape recorders to make them run backwards, something Waisvisz might have done. "I love gadgets, man. I'll try anything once."

It's not just musicians who want more tactile, more fluid interfaces. Maggie Orth, a RISD graduate who designed the physical environment for the Brain Opera, did textile and theater design before going to MIT.

"For the first 25 years," she says, "computer and interface design were driven by the idea of productivity, but when artists started using the computer, they began to demand different ways to reach it, ways as sophisticated and tactile as a paintbrush or a violin."

The consequences of this change are only beginning to be felt. "This work has had an enormous influence, not only on interface design--the kinds of objects we expect to touch when we work with a computer--but how we understand computers," Orth says.

Still, for artists, the new interfaces carry risks. They can feel gimmicky; their novelty sometimes overwhelms the content of the work. What does it take to make a new art form feel authentic?

Laetitia Sonami has been making music with data gloves since the late 1980s. "Data glove" is an overly dignified term for her first instruments--a pair of rubber kitchen gloves, the fingertips outfitted with magnetic sensors from window alarms. Sonami wanted to make her instrument more sophisticated, so she turned to STEIM for technical assistance.

She now works with a single left-hand glove, built to her specifications by STEIM-associated digital instrument craftsman Bert Bongers. "The glove itself is made of Lycra mesh," she says, when I interview her at STEIM the day after her performance at Touch. "It was made to measure in Paris by people who do costumes for dancers. The sensors are sewn onto the Lycra. On the tip of the fingers, on top of the nails, there are microswitches--when I press them I can feel some resistance, which is important, because with all of the other sensors I don't feel an actual feedback. On the other side of the fingertips there are magnetic sensors, with a magnet on the thumb and sensors on the four fingers. By bringing the thumb closer to the other fingers I get varying voltage."

When you watch Sonami on stage, you are not thinking about any of this. She begins by pulling in a low thrumming noise, waving it in with her fingers. Then she stretches her fingers to make the noise pulse in and out, and twists in some tremolo. Her gestures are careful, tense, and deliberate.

There is nothing gimmicky about what Sonami is doing. This is the only way you could play this kind of music. This instrument, in the hands of this performer, makes sense. It's a good interface.

It took Sonami 10 years to get to this point. "Michel Waisvisz made it possible for composers like me to continue," Sonami says. "He and STEIM support people like me, people who are on the fringe."

Or, perhaps, not so much on the fringe anymore.

The City Museum in The Hague has an excellent permanent collection of historic musical instruments. It includes harpsichords from the seventeenth century, English horns in various curved and jointed configurations, and a variety of viols, lutes, and other unfamiliar stringed objects. They have a re-creation of Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I from 1964, and a Yamaha DX-7, the quintessential MIDI keyboard of the 1980s. And they have Michel Waisvisz's original Hands. Whether the Hands are historic progenitors or quaintly obsolete oddities is anyone's guess.


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