Interface

Guitar effects titan Boss has unveiled a personal amp/effects modeling interface for guitar that works with a mobile app to offer powerful tone shaping while learning or jamming with YouTube videos.

IK Multimedia's Axe I/O guitar interface now has a baby brother. The Solo is a cheaper, more compact bus-powered version of its impressive sibling, with two inputs and three outputs, instrument tone shaping and music production software bundled in.

Imagine touching the armrest of your sofa to change the channel on your television, or pressing against a lightbulb stencil on the wall to turn on your smart light – these functions and many more like them are now possible thanks to new research.

In order for surgeons to maintain sterility in the operating room, they certainly shouldn't be using touchscreens. A new wearable, however, may allow them to navigate content such as preoperative planning diagrams, without touching the screen.

We've already seen tactile-feedback displays that convey information by applying tiny vibrations to the user's fingertips. An experimental new technology takes a different approach, however – it gets sticky in select areas.

It's not uncommon for us humans to communicate via pokes and other skin-on-skin gestures. Could the same thing work for communicating with devices? It turns out that if you give those gadgets a coating of "Skin-On" artificial skin, the answer is Yes.

IK Multimedia has announced a new practice amp with an integrated digital interface. The iRig Micro Amp allows bedroom guitarists or street performers to tap into a modeling universe of digital tone, either plugged into the mains or running on battery power.

Zoom has launched a new USB audio interface for guitarists called the GCE-3, and it's tiny. Designed to unobtrusively fit in a pocket or gig bag, the interface works with the company's amp emulation and effects simulation software so players can plug in and capture riff creations while on the move.

There are a number of devices available that allow musicians to connect a guitar to a computer. But IK Multimedia says its Axe I/O is the high-end audio interface that guitar and bass players have been waiting for.

Researchers at the University of Sussex have developed SoundBender, a technology that bends sound waves around obstacles to acoustically levitate objects above them.

Google's Magenta project has unveiled a hardware interface for an algorithm-based synthesizer that uses a deep neural network to generate completely new sounds. Musicians drag a finger around the NSynth Super's touchscreen to explore the unique sounds offered up by the machine learning algorithm.​

The Fingersound ring developed by researchers at Georgia Tech features built-in microphones and gyroscopes that allow the wearer to discreetly give commands or input data to connected devices by tracing lines and characters on their fingers with their thumb.