A digital wand that you may 'paint' sounds on is a recent project of Ph.D. candidate David Merrill (MIT) together with fellow Ph.D. candidate Hayes Raffle that will be shown at this year's SIGGRAPH. The device lets you record a sound and combine it with any surface you may scrub it against. Unfortunately, I haven't found a sound demo yet, but this tool promises fun with interesting sound effects. (Source)

Projects like this remind me of my own Storm and Stress time when I had to develop a sound system for auralizing a Virtual Reality system (long, long ago). I've got a then revolutionary Polhemus system, the Paradigm Audio Library, a Yamaha Synthesizer (think it was a SY99), an Ensoniq DP4, an Atari ST with Cubase and a Silicon Graphics target system the software had to run with. Though this was really hard work (I had to learn Unix (IRIX on a SGI), C and that sound library with a half year. This deadline was fixed.), I never had more fun and never learned more about Unix/C/socket programming than in these days. It's great pleasure to see that there's still a place for innovative and geeky projects like the one above.