At the MIT Media Lab's recent 25th anniversary celebration, the program included a number of alumni of the graduate program speaking about their time there. One of the most compelling stories was that of Eran Egozy, who helped form Harmonix, the company that brought us Guitar Hero. Egozy traced how a set of projects gradually built both the desire and technology needed to give everyone the chance to think they're a musician.
Egozy came to MIT with an interest in music, since he is a classically trained clarinet player (The man who introduced him joked, "if there were no business concerns, Eran would actually have created Clarinet Hero.") But the first project he recalled involved the piano, specifically the player piano, a machine that played a regular upright piano using notes encoded as gaps in a roll of paper.
Egozy had apparently come across a series of scrolls that dated from the 1920s, but had nothing to play them on, a problem he solved in true Media Lab style. To feed the scrolls, he built a mechanism out of LEGO that fed them under a video camera. The video feed went to a NeXT box, which digitized it, read it, and converted it to MIDI. The MIDI was then sent over the network to a MIDI piano that resided in the basement.
From there, he moved on to a project called the hyperviolin, the second in a series that started with a hypercello played by YoYo Ma. The hyperinstruments contain sensors that captured the instrument's motion and the player's gestures. These are then digitized and incorporated into the musical performance. For the hyperviolin, played by Ani Kavafian, this required a system that, in Egozy's words, was "freakin' complicated." Two computers were needed, one doing pitch detection in real time, and another controlling the output. The experience got Egozy hooked, since he and his fellow students "weren't holed up in a lab working on something nobody saw."
But his next project involved repurposing the sensors, which could detect changes in motion in their vicinity. The first step involved turning a table top into a gesture-based interface, much like a mouse pad, but operating in three dimensions, without the operator needing to touch anything. One faculty member apparently used this to advance slides in his talk by waving his arm.
From there, Egozy helped bring the focus back to music by creating a device that read gestures and converted them directly to notes. The hardware itself went on tour with Penn and Teller, and Egozy has pictures with them. Although it might seem like a simple extension of the hyperviolin, the project was distinctly different, in that there was no music involved; the computers had to ensure that it sounded good, had the right key, right timing, right tempo.
With that system in place, just about anything that could control a computer could produce music. That's where his partner, Alex Rigopulos, came into the picture. Apparently, Rigopulos was a big flight simulator fan, and convinced Egozy to work with him to get a flight sim joystick to control the music software. The project got a big boost when musician Peter Gabriel stopped by to check the system out, and apparently came away impressed.
Harmonix came about due to a simple fact of life. "Alex and I had to graduate—it's one of those sad things that happens once in a while," Egozy said. "We knew no one would ever give us a job doing that, so the only solution really was to start a company." That seems to have worked out pretty well for them.
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