Tomás Henriques (FCSH/UNL) wins Guthman Musical Instrument Competition

CoLab researcher Tomás Henriques has won the 2010 Guthman Musical Instrument Competi­tion for his Double Slide Controller, an electronic instrument featuring two slides inspired by the trombone.

Henriques describes his Double Slide Controller as “a new electronic instrument whose playing technique is based on the acoustic slide trombone. It has two independent slides and two ver­satile hand controllers that allow free motion in three spatial dimensions.” A demo with more explanation is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEDAJY92gt4

Tomás Henriques is a researcher at the Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical (CESEM), Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is currently on a post-doctoral research leave and teaching in the Music Department at Buffalo State College. He collaborates with Carlos Guedes and Bruce Pennycook in the CoLab-funded research project “Kinetic Controller Driven Music Systems”. He is a composer for both acoustic and electronic instruments and conducts research on real-time interactive music composition and interfaces for real-time speech synthesis.

The Guthman Musical Instrument Competition is an annual event at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology which awards a prize for the best new ideas integrating musicality, design and engineering.