Making Music Breathe

In this week's Digital Media Insider podcast, "Express Yourself," I played a bunch of examples recorded with wind controllers, electronic devices that transform the player's breath into expressive musical gestures. Matt Traum, who contributed the amazing Crumar sawtooth solo, just wrote to remind me about the extensive wind controller FAQ on his site.

Matt Traum on the Steiner EVI.

As a former French horn player who now lives in the push-button world of computers and MIDI keyboards, I've been planning to get into wind control myself. Time to haul that BC3 out of the closet and start breathing more life into my music!

The MIDI Solutions Breath Controller interface connects to the Yamaha BC3A breath controller headset (shown smaller than relative size here) to translate your breath pressure into MIDI data.