Neil Gershenfeld

resolution and bandwidth.

It's how fast can you measure what he does and the bandwidth and the resolution of detecting his controls and then mapping them into sounds.

And what we found, what he found was if you instrument everything he does and connect it to almost anything,

it sounds like Yo-Yo, that the magic is in the control, not in ineffable details in how the wood wiggles.

And so with Yo-Yo and Todd, that led to a piece.

And towards the end, I asked Yo-Yo what it would take for him to get rid of his Strat and use our stuff.

And his answer was just logistics.

It was at that time, our stuff was like a rack of electronics and lots of cables and some grad students to make it work.

Once the technology becomes as invisible as the Strad, then sure, absolutely, he would take it.

And by the way, as a footnote on the footnote, an accident in the sensing of Yo-Yo's cello led to a $100 million a year auto safety business to control airbags in cars.

How did that work?

I had to instrument the bow without interfering with it.

So I set up local electromagnetic fields where I would detect how those fields interact with the bow he's playing.

But we had a problem that whenever his hand got near these sensing fields, I would start sensing his hand rather than the materials on the bow.

I didn't quite understand what was going on with that interference.

So my very first grad student ever, Josh Smith, did a thesis on tomography with electric fields, how to see in 3D with electric fields.

Then through Todd and at that point, research scientist in my lab, Joe Paradiso, it led to a collaboration with Penn and Teller, who...

where we did a magic trick in Las Vegas to contact Houdini.

And sort of these fields are sort of like, you know, contacting spirits.

So we did a magic trick in Las Vegas.