Alain Crevoisier (1969, Swiss)

I started electronic music when I was 15, in 1985. A bit earlier I got from my parents an electronic keyboard and got curious about that black plug in the back the manual said it was “for a future extension with a personal computer”. As I just got my first computer, a Commodore 64, I started to look around to get more info. At that time, few people new about MIDI (invented in 83) and of course there was nothing like Google! After 6 months asking every music shop in Switzerland without success, I finally met a guy in a music studio who introduced me to SuperTrack (the ancestror of Logic, created by music software pioneer Gerhard Lengeling), one of the first MIDI sequencer on the market. From that moment on, I started to spend almost all my knights to compose music and all my pocket money to expand my home studio. However, after a few years I got frustrated by the fact I could not play the music I was composing. Being a poor keyboard player, the only performing action I could do was to press the space bar on the computer to start the sequencer…

One option could have been to start DJ’ing (I believe that DJ’ing developed as a consequence to the diminution of the performing ability of electronic music), but I preferred to turn back to my good old violin, which I precisely abandoned some years earlier to start learning keyboard. Still, I was looking for new things and in 1995, while I was studying micro-engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), I chose to realise an electric violin with new electro-magnetic transducers for my final project. This is probably when my passion to invent new musical instruments all started. However, I was not satisfied by this first experiment, I wanted to make new instruments that do not look like classical ones, even if the sound is different. In 98 I discovered about the work of Sergi Jorda, who got a lot of attention recently with the reacTable, and the next year I moved to Barcelona to start a Master in Digital Art (music section) under his supervision. During this time I started to study more deeply the interaction between movement and sound, and the interfacing technologies to link the two. I developed the concept of “acoustic controllers”, with the idea to make hybrid electronic-acoustic instruments that would be performed using the vibrating body as control interface. In 2001 I made a first prototype of acoustic controller, with a wood board and four contact sensors to locate taps on the surface. The sound of the board was processed in real-time, with the position of the taps being mapped to the cut-off frequency and amplitude of a low-pass filter. However, the location algorithm was not yet very reliable and in order to further study and develop the acoustic sensing technology, I set-up a European project of research, the TAI-CHI project (Tangible Acoustic Interfaces for Computer-Human Interaction), which started in 2004 and lasted until the end of 2006. This project brought many interesting outcomes, such as the Sound Rose installation, the Touch Table and the Percussion Tray. In the beginning of 2007 I’ve started a new project at the Music Conservatory of Geneva, the iPercussion project, to further develop the musical application of the TAI-CHI project, and also do research on computer vision based multi-touch detection, in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, where I'm still working part-time as project manager.