Interesting Electronic/Midi Instruments - Hurdy Gurdy

On our epic roadtrip through Spain/France this summer we passed through the Basque region and stopped off in Pau where these two music festival posters for the Hestiv d'Oc caught my eye.


I'd forgotten about this instrument, although it features in a number of well known English folk bands with Blowzabella probably being the most well known to feature it. What struck me, is both the shape and human interaction probably make this ripe for an electronic hacking intervention and was curious to see what there was.

The relative obscurity of the instrument would probably keep the number down, but as this is basically a key and wheel interface device it is probably ripe for a few people to give it a go and get the melody and drone sounds with some electronic effects thrown in. I was pleased to see some really interesting results.

First of all Bryan Tolley has some interesting examples along with some YouTube examples here and here. In this case Bryan has followed the 'electric guitar' route with a mixed electronic instrument along with effects.

I'm not sure how electronic the instrument is, but this is certainly using some electronic effects to interesting result below:

Then I took a look for fully electronic implementations and came across the very interesting MIDI-gurdy:

This is a hurdy-gurdy MIDI controller with the sound synthesis made via an accompanying iPad application. You can see it being played below. Neat, this looks very interesting. I like the styling and the wooden buttons.

Which returns us to where we began on finding this opto-electronic version or Vielle a Roue Optoelectronic which was commissioned for the very same festival in Pau that I saw the poster for...