Originally published at: A musician couple used biosonic MIDI technology to convert their baby's ultrasound into music | Boing Boing
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“Unborn Baby Records Debut Album”
Kinda makes it sound like the unborn baby was the producer/mixer/engineer… I’m picturing unborn baby leaning over the console, cigarette in hand, yelling over the talk-back mic to the drummer “get the ring out of the fucking snare or fucking go home!!!”
There’s a whole bunch of woo to unpack here. The midi conversion device " MIDI Biodata Sonication Device Doesn’t pick up the vibrations of the fetus, it detects Electrodermal activity EDA - skin conductance caused by sweat. Same tech used in polygraphs and Scientology E-Meters.
Useful (musical) MIDI data can be aquired from anything that changes overtime that can be sampled, just throw some sort of algorithmic filter over the raw data and with some rules determine some pitch and duration output and then quantize that into whatever musical scale you like and Bob’s your uncle.
What me skeptical?
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I am not sure the device could not pick up movement, or at least the cause of movement. Muscles are electric devices after all and can create a signal a device like that could pick up. ECGs are basically galvanometers so why would it not work on other internal muscles?
On the other hand the article says the device was attached to her stomach so Glod knows what it picked up 
To be honest I’d be more interested if it was picking up all the internal movements! Mic up the tummy I say!
The MIDI device used is a reworking of a device featured on BB that generated music from plants and trees (couldn’t find the article). I guess my problem with this sort of generative music where the source is organic, be that tree or human, is that it is hard to ‘hear’ a relationship to the source… the choice of instruments and whatever processes that intervene often end up in pure abstraction.
With nature driven machines like kinetic wind instruments and drawing machines their is a visceral perception of the relationship of the source to the output. The art is in the craft and choices made by the artist in building the instrument/machine.
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