TED Talk Thursday – Onyx Ashanti: This is beatjazz

According to TED.com: “Musician and inventor Onyx Ashanti demonstrates “beatjazz” — his music created with two handheld controllers, an iPhone and a mouthpiece, and played with the entire body. At TED’s Full Spectrum Auditions, after locking in his beats and loops, he plays a 3-minute song that shares his vision for the future of music.”

Onyx Ashanti is a musician, geek, open-source advocate, Maker, collaborator … and we come back around again to musician. The intrumentation he has created fuses technique and technology into a full-body musical system, playable with hands, arms, mouth and body. As he says:

I am what can only be described as a cyborg musician.  in other words, the music i create live, can not be replicated without technology. My music is called “Beatjazz.” It is a mix of sound design, live looping and jazz improvisation. My instrument of choice over the years has been a Yamaha Wind MIDI controller, but now the limitations have started to stunt the growth of this new form, so i designed an instrument that can take it into future.

He is now working on the next iteration of his instrument, codenamed Tron, and built around a helmet-mounted controller.”

Enjoy!

For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com: “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”

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I look forward to your thoughts and comments!