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03/20/2012 05:00 AM

Tech Beat: Devices that blend music, technology thrive at SXSW Festival

There were plenty of strange creations that mixed music with technology at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. YNN's Adam Balkin filed the following report.

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When you get music and technology together at festivals like SXSW, it shouldn't be surprising that new musical tech offspring emerges.

The so-called UFO is a device created by an electronic music band called Phantom out of Finland. It allows the user to control virtually any sound by moving hands around these sensors and the distance from the sensors actually alters the pitch.

"You can control it with your laptop and you just kind of play air guitar but sort of real," says Hanna Toivonen of Phantom.

Liquipel has developed a nanotechnology coating for making any piece of electronics completely waterproof and it is now applied to Blue microphones, protecting them from salivating singers, in more ways than one.

"It doesn't allow the bacteria to stick to the microphone. So if someone is sick, they have strep, they're singing on that microphone, the next person who grabs that mic they have a good possibility of catching whatever germs are on the mic," says Sam Winkler of Liquipel. "Now with Liquipel's nanotechnology and anti-bacterial technology, basically the germs will not stick to the device."

Literally switching gears for a bit, there is now a bicycle that allows riders to switch gears using just their minds. The Prius Concept bike devised by Saatchi LA as a marketing tool for Toyota. Through headgear full of brainwave-reading sensors, which can be built into a helmet, riders can change gears via an iPhone controller.

Eventually, changing gears with brainwaves will be easier than doing it with a twist with the hand.

"As technology as we become more used to it, these different types of interfaces, it'll be just subconscious 100 years from now," says Patrick Miller of Deeplocal. "We'll say, 'Wow, that's weird, they're using their hands for this.' Makes so much sense just to think about these things."

More near-future applications of the technology, though, include the possibility of allowing people who have lost use of their limbs to become more independent.