Facial music, indeed. Daito Manabe has made the music the controller and his face the controlled in a new project. (As several commenters were quick to note, I got this exactly backwards when I posted this a few minutes ago: his face is the output, and the music the input.)
Daito Manabe is a Japanese-based composer, media artist, and DJ who does strange and wonderful things with inputs. This time, he’s hooked up electrical outputs to his face, so multimedia software Max/MSP, his usual tool of choice, can sequence muscle movements via electrical pulses transmitted directly to the surface of his face.
This is just one tech demo, but as an artist he does work in more fully-formed, full-length works — and happens to be coming to New York in November as part of a multimedia show at the Japan Society. Daito, if you’re out there reading I hope to catch up with you then, and perhaps buy you a Kirin, my honorary beer since it’s typically how my name is misspelled. (Peter Kirin is my typo Japanese alterego; the more popular Peter Kim my typo Korean doppelganger.)
Here’s another video; thanks to oscillateur and cptn for catching my jet lagged error.