Tyler Freeman, also known as odbol, is a musician/artist and has designed a pair of drum machine pants. The pants are loaded up with patches and connected to a small, external MIDI controller that produces a different drum noise when tapped with the hand. Odbol can produce some decent beats and even put on a show after hooking up the MIDI controller to a beat-looping machine. He does deserve props for being willing to slap himself all over the pants area — he's a bigger man than I.
When wearing and playing the pants, "odbol" considers himself a cyborg musician whose body assumes the role of the player and the instrument and allows for "spontaneous electric hambone solos." Cyborg? How about a broke artist/musician? Follow the link below to see the drum pants in action.
Drumpants, via Fresh Creation
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By trsim at 8:57 PM ON 09/11/07
I'll definitely be willing to give him props on being able to design something like that. The technology there could probably be easily modified for other uses as well. As to the current application, well...
When I watched the top video, it didn't look he had made it too clear exactly what he was doing. I know if I had just been walking by, I would've thought that he was just some guy sitting on the street with a stereo and smacking his legs. Especially since there didn't seem to be any correlation to what he was doing on his legs to the music coming out.
Also, he probably should work on his drum skills before posting a video like that. Again, cool idea, but I also know enough about how well I play "air drums" to know that I'd prefer my delusions of grandeur that I'm as good as one of those crazy drummers surround by basses, cymbals and other snares and drums.