Discord over wired 'conducting' jacket

Sir Andrew: Found idea of the jacket highly amusing

Conductor Sir Andrew Davis has said a newly developed electronic Lycra jacket which plays music out of tune unless its wearer conducts "correctly" is "totally daft".

The new tailcoat is fitted with skin sensors which monitor the wearer's heartbeat and the electrical impulses generated by their muscles.

The idea of wearing Lycra is totally appalling to me

Sir Andrew Davis

Developed by Dr Teresa Marrin Nakra at the media lab in America's Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), its aim is to train students to conduct an orchestra.

But Sir Andrew, currently in rehearsal with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and famed for his 11 years' work with the Last Night of the Proms, derided the idea.

"Firstly, the idea of wearing Lycra is totally appalling to me," he told BBC News Online.

"I don't understand how it could work - what is the 'correct' way to conduct?

"The thing that makes live music a success is that nobody ever does anything in the same way."

Conducting an orchestra takes years of practise

The conventional learning method for conducting involves practising the movements - with the right hand keeping time and the left signalling expression - in front of a mirror.

But the New Scientist magazine reports that the new jacket could halve the time it takes to progress from novice to intermediate, from six months to three.

The jacket is connected to a PC playing music which distorts if the conductor tenses up or makes a movement which a professional would not make, according to the New Scientist magazine.

The system was calibrated by six professional conductors, including Benjamin Zander of the Boston Philharmonic, Keith Lockhart of the Boston Pops Orchestra and Dr Zander, who tested the software for hundreds of hours.

Sir Andrew: Famed for conducting at the Proms and Glyndebourne

The PC correlated data from each conductor's muscle and heart activity with the volume, tempo and emotional response each one used for particular musical passages.

The idea behind this was that it would give the computer the "knowledge" to then interpret the students' movements to give the music emotional highs and lows, as well as keep in time.

But Sir Andrew, who also worked as Music Director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, remained bemused by the whole concept.

"Training conductors is a very difficult thing - you can teach basic patterns but in the end it's all about communicating something you have in your own heart and head and transmitting that to the audience," he said.

And former amateur conductor Les Pratt, who now works at BBC Radio 3, added: "For me, conducting is totally subjective; there is no right or wrong way to communicate one's feelings about a musical score.

'Muscle memories'

"I think that teaching young people with this new machine is likely to produce a generation of musical automatons, which is not what the music industry needs."

But Gary Hill, a teacher of orchestral conducting at Arizona State University, is a fan of the jacket, which he discovered when he was looking for a better way to teach the discipline.

In his classes the computer responses are said to encourage students to associate the right "muscle memories" with musical sounds - but also penalise them for tensing in ways that professionals usually avoid.

Barry Kraus, one of Hill's students, said: "You learn to make sure you relax enough so your gestures stand out."