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Music

Introducing Drumpants: The Wireless Controller That Lets Your Pants Control Everything

Watch an augmented reality drum performance created using the sweet new wearable from Tappur.
GIFs and images courtesy of Tappur

You're the kind of person who's always tapping on their desk, thighs, and every other surface they can get their hands on. At home, if you're not at your drum set, you're on your MPC, scrolling through sounds and sampling until the sun rises and it's back to your makeshift tabletop kit all over again. If this sounds at all like your average daily grind, there's a new kind of wearable controller that was practically made for you: DrumPants.

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"Part man, part drum machine," its creators, Tappur, a content-aware wearable software and hardware company founded in November 2013, calls them. With over 150 built-in sounds, support of Apple’s Bluetooth over MIDI protocol (allowing access to over 300 music apps in the App Store), and the ability to loop and edit music on the fly, they might be just the new technology you've been waiting for.

On May 13, DrumPants 2.0 was unleashed on Indiegogo, alongside a host of demos detailing its wide range of functionality. Above, The Creators Project premieres The Augmented Drummer, a short film from Tappur designed to demonstrate DrumPants' potentials for what its creators call, "cybernetic integration," the connection between humans, wearables, and the connected world around us.

In the video above, you can watch drummer Zach Bookstein blast through a drum performance augmented with visuals provided by Patatap's Jono BR1 and sounds by Japanese musical duo Lullatone. "The drummer's body is augmented with DrumPants sensors that allow him to control parts of the performance that would normally fall to an automated process or another performer, allowing him to expand the traditional methods of playing drums," Tappur CTO, Tyler Freeman, explains to The Creators Project. "The DrumPants trigger animations and sound samples on the video projection behind him."

You can wear 'em on your pants, in your shoes, or set them on a tabletip: The result is a kind of interface experience that engages not only DrumPants' capacities as a live controller, but exposes its potentials for gaming, connected devices on the Internet of Things, and even Oculus Rift. "With the ubiquity of smartphones, and the rising use of smartwatches, mind reading headsets, and other wearable devices," Freeman explains, "we are bringing the digital interface closer and closer to the body, until soon these interfaces will be indistinguishable from ourselves."

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At the moment, Tappur is well on its way to achieving its $35,000 fundraising goal. If you're the kind of aforementioned nonstop drummer, head over to Indiegogo to snag your own DrumPants 2.0 kit, check out the device's possibilities, and show your support.

The DrumPants App

Click here to learn more about DrumPants.

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