Laetitia Sonami (born 1957)
Laetitia Sonami was born in France but settled in the U.S. in 1975. She studied composition at Mills College in Oakland and began pursuing an idiosyncratic career in electronic music.
Sonami is particularly interested in interactive real-time generation and manipulation of sound. Two of her inventions are the Lady’s Glove and the Spring Spyre, both of which she demonstrated in Artistic Keynotes for the 2014 NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) conference that are available on video.
The Lady’s Glove dates originally from 1991 but has undergone several enhancements. The first version consisted of a pair of rubber kitchen gloves with transducers on the fingertips to generate MIDI signals. Later versions were more sophisticated and fed signals into MAX-MSP software. She has written:
The intention in building such a glove was to allow movement without spatial reference, and most importantly to allow for multiple, simultaneous controls. The sounds are now “embodied,” the controls intuitive, and the performance fluid. It has become a fine instrument.
Here is a presentation of the final version of the Lady’s Glove before the device was retired. After a 3-minute introduction, Laetitia Sonami begins talking about the Lady’s Glove, but with unexpected interruptions and manipulations from the glove until it takes over:
The Spring Spyre is newer, and according to her website, “is based on the application of neural networks to real-time audio synthesis.”