Technology...is nothing sacred??

[Patchoulia]

I just saw a commercial for a DVD version of the game "Candyland".

I feel incredibly old.

[bradm]

Check out

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8383

I don't know whether this is a good thing, or an abomination.

Aloha,

Brad

[Tooly]

id stick with the latter brah(d)

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

In dunno, I've seen a few abominations in my day, and this would seem to fit in nice and snug with them. Are people so alienated from something as relatively simple as the pressing down of strings on a fret that they need to interpolate dizzyingly complex technologies to make up for it?

Or, hell, even just wailing on a tennis racket, fer Chrissake.

Not to say I wouldn't try it out if I had a chance... .

[bradm]

See, to me, it's an abomination not because it allows guitar players to play without having a guitar, it's an abomination because it dissolves the concept of "air guitar" completely: air guitar is a form of mime set to recorded music, rather than a way to actually make music. In essence, it converts a kind of "play acting" into something that's the real thing, and that's not what air guitar should be. I don't want air guitarists to be able to make music without having to learn guitar (as I did; I made the leap from air guitar to real guitar in late high school). A person playing air guitar knows he's faking it; in fact, the whole thing is about the faking of it (the "it" being the music you're air guitaring along to). This technology blurs the line between faking it and making it.

I've seen this kind of technology before, sometimes as science museums (or universities), where people get to create or manipulate sounds by waving their hands in the air (like they just don't care...), and I think that's kind of cool (esp. for people untrained in music), because it's creating a brand new musical experience, not adding a veneer of reality to a fake substructure.

Aloha,

Brad

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Thanks for putting it that clearly, Mr. M. Faking is the essential quality to air guitar that should never be sacrificed on the altar of real effort.

I remember the first time I saw/played along with a display in a museum like you mention - virtual harps, drums, etc., that you play by waving your arms and hands, as if you had a theramin in front of you. What really got me, though, was the band that became Days of You, back, say, in 1988 or 89, having someone dance away in a full-body white suit whose image was captured on camera and fed through a computer to a half-dozen monitors on either side of the stage; these would run through a really impressive sequence of interactive images (say, him running through a hallway into a castle before breaking through a doorway and wheeling out into a starry sky), including a space with a dozen or so virtual hand-drums on either side of him that he would flail about playing, along with the real drums in the band....

I'm not sure if I'm describing that adequately, but it sure was impressive.

[Patchoulia]

The international air guitar championships are held yearly in Finland--but I think you have to win regional/national qualifiers, you can't just show up and air-rock.

[Del]

Didn't some dude win the Canadian championships "air guitaring" to nero a couple of years ago?

[Hal Johnson]

I watched the air guitar championships on T.V. While the show it self was highly entertaining, there seemed to be a lot of politics behind the judging, and the winner wasnt all that good. But, wow, their training exercises were top-notch, to say the least.