IK to let you play music with your fingers and a phone

With so much technology around us, musical instruments are really beginning to change. Gibson has a robotic guitar and Yamaha has some electric hollow string instruments, but IK hopes to turn iDevices into music makers with something that looks like jewellery.

Not quite a ring, the IK iRing os a small controller that an Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad can monitor as you move your hands about, waving them left, right, and up and down, with different sounds coming out of a device nearby.

Built into a plastic piece that can be reversed and kept between your fingers, the iRing uses two sets of markers on either side and a special app to turn your hands into the command system for its apps, one of which will let you control music apps on a MIDI and DJ apps on a Mac, while the other will let you make music with various gestures.

Consider it like a theremin for an Apple iDevice, with the apps telling the top camera to watch out for the three black dots on the iRing and their position in space.

As you move your hands and run the app, the software picks up on what your hands are doing, or rather where the iRing is, and makes the app respond accordingly.

If you’re a musician, this could mean Apple’s Logic lets you control various effects while playing live, or if you’re not, the iRing Music Maker app could let you craft music from merely your hand movements.

All up, it’s an interesting idea, and one of the more unique concepts we’re seeing from CES this year, with IK Multimedia telling us that it should start shipping worldwide within the next few months, with the rings available in three colours.