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Music

Your Shaking Butt Is Now a Musical Instrument

Finally.

Twerkers of the world, rejoice: a state-of-the-art device now enables dancers to play music by shaking their butts. The result of a collaborative project between AIAIAI (the design-led headphone company responsible for Sound Taxi), Branko from Buraka Som Sistema, professional rumpshaker Twerk Queen Louise, and the Dutch design and technology company Owow, [Real Booty Music](http:// http://realbootymusic.aiaiai.dk/) is an exploration into "whether it’s possible to change the perception of twerking through placing it in a technology-driven, creative context," according to the artists, and has resulted in the unprecedented new instrument, the Booty Drum.

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You can twerk to music. You can twerk without music. Now, your twerks can make music. Explains Owow, "The Booty Drum is a device that records movement through accelerometers attached to the dancer’s booty. These movements translate into a lot of unique velocities and directions of movement. The movements, which are being mapped into unique MIDI values through Arduino hardware and processing software, can in this way be used to trigger samples and create sounds in Ableton. As every single movement sends out a unique set of values, the dancer is able to play around with sounds."

If you can't think of the potential applications, from live performance to rhythm and dance video gaming, you need to learn how to shake your butt better. If you're thinking it's too good to be true, just listen to "Cascavel" below, a brand new track from Branko and JSTJR that was "played" by the seismic waves of Twerk Queen Louise's posterior, and check out the mini-doc on Real Booty Music below. You'll be glad you did.

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