How Orangutans Might Make Electronic Music In The Future

This high-tech gear could help aspiring orangutan techno producers to someday achieve their dreams.

If there’s one thing we’re sure of, it’s that orangutans are intelligent, sentient beings with a clear sense of past, present and future. And like any sentient being, they need to be entertained, and they probably like techno.

A team of researchers at the University of Melbourne’s Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces are currently working on a musical game for orangutans that combines objects and spatial depth with sound generation.

The basic idea is that the orangutans will be able to make music by holding objects mapped to certain tones, audio tracks and sound characteristics. The device would let them create sounds by moving around and swinging their arms.

Dang. We bet if we got an infinite number of these guys rigged up in a room they’d be able to at least come up with the complete Tresor back catalog. Barring that, here’s to hoping their creations will be better than 50% of the crap out there right now, right?

Watch the full report by ABC Australia’s Catalyst program here. And then you can go and listen to the world’s largest natural sound archive online here.

(Via Mashable)