To create music you generally need an instrument – that goes without saying, right? You can either beat a drum or pluck a guitar to create a melody to your liking.
But what about creating sounds by making shapes in the air with special high-tech gloves?
It’s hard not to be sceptical at first, but electronic music duo Ray Li and Michael Ndubuisi have set out to show the world an alternative way to create music.
The friends, who call themselves virtual reality DJs, claim they have found a way to play notes just by striking virtual chords and touching their fingers together.
In the YouTube video above, Ray can be seen using his gloves to create a rendition of P!nk’s What About Us.
The 25-year-old musicians quit their jobs earlier this year to create content for their YouTube channel – Spectrum – on a full-time basis.
One half of the musical duo, Michael, said: “We had this idea of wanting to hold and shape sound, as if it were a physical object.”
He added: “We experimented with quite a few prototypes of instruments before eventually landing on the concept of using gloves.”
The pair were put together as roommates in their first year at Cornell University and both graduated in engineering in 2014.
This is where, according to Michael, their musical journey began as they started “combining tech and music” and experimenting with different instruments.
We are Spectrum. We are the future of music. pic.twitter.com/fIWwZYe3I3
— Spectrum (@musicofspectrum) October 19, 2017
The duo, who also perform live, created the initial glove prototype when they were still at university but have since developed them to create an instrument that showed a “high level of control and expression”, displayed by Ray in the video.
Michael says the gloves can have any type of sound, ranging from “real” instruments like piano or guitar, to completely synthetic and electronic sounds.
They chose to cover the P!nk hit because it’s a song they thought would be a good demonstration of the expressiveness of the gloves.
