A couple months back I was super-impressed by the videos I saw for the Monome, an open-source digital music interface that held some serious potential for creating a more tangible link to spontaneous digital music creation. It turns out my friend John knows one of the creators, and somehow convinced him to FedEx a Monome to him while he's on his honeymoon. So John was gracious enough to open the "Monome discovery sessions" to myself and Chris, a fellow colleague of 'big blue'. A few hours of playing with the Monome certainly doesn't make us anywhere near "good" at using the thing, but my interest is certainly piqued-- this little box makes creating electronic music fun and improvisational, instead of a painfully slow process that requires precision and concept.
The Monome uses open-source software applications to give purpose to the array of 64 LED-backed buttons. Some of the programs are more accessible than others, but at the end of last night we started using a program called 'Step', that convinced me that the high cost might be worth it. 'Step' basically allows you to load 8 separate samples (one for each row) and then sequence the sample over 8 buttons (each column). What made this program click for me was that the software displayed the waveform for each sample, and the user can select the potion of the sample to use. This is interesting because-- unless the user knows what sound they want-- a sample is chosen visually, based on an interesting-looking waveform section. As a result, truly improvisational digital music is made quite easily, tangibly, and visually-- three qualities I really really like.
The following is for reference only:
(The previous video was solely for self-indulgent life-casting purposes, and is not indicative of the quality of results possible with the Monome. To see much MUCH better clips of the Monome in use please refer to here or here.) 8/31/2006
