Reply To: Coverville 500, Las Vegas 8/15/08
There used to be a theremin (or a machine that behaved like one — what do I know, really?) at San Francisco’s Exploratorium. It had two antennae that controlled loudness and pitch, so your hands, waved close enough to those antennae to generate sound from them, would allow you to make changeable musical sounds.
Unfortunately, the learning curve required to figure out where exactly was the particular piece of air you had to caress in order to make the sounds sound good, was a very long curve. So the machine tended to get monopolized by bad musicians struggling with their early finger exercises. And it didn’t sound pretty. Not at all.