WHEN Teresa Marrin Nakra slips into her Lycra jacket and begins to conduct, a
stream of note-perfect orchestral music pours forth. But if she hands the
sensor-stuffed garment to an untrained friend, the music slurs, as if the whole
orchestra was suddenly drunk.
There are no musicians in Nakra’s laboratory at Immersion Music in Haverhill,
Massachusetts—only a cyber-orchestra, made up of groups of instrumental
sounds inside a synthesiser. But just like the real thing, the cyber-orchestra
only plays well if it’s conducted properly, with the conductor’s right arm
signalling volume and the left arm beating time.
“She plays the system just like an instrument,” says…
