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MIT Students' Audiopad Mixes Electronic Music
nicodemus05 writes "Grad students at MIT's Media Lab have come up with an innovative control device called the Audiopad to run their digital music studio. The Audiopad, '...is a composition and performance instrument for electronic music which tracks the positions of objects on a tabletop surface and converts their motion into music.' It's practical, but more importantly it looks really, really cool."
Excuse me for being software-minded, but wouldn't it be possible to use some of the control-functions and build a MIDI-controller to use with softsynths, or even modular software such as Reaktor?
I think it would offer some interesting possibilities.
This reminds me of this. It is called Mixed Reality Pong.
Mixed Reality Pong is a mixed reality version of the classic "Pong" game. The aim of the game is to score goals by hitting a virtual ball over the other end of the game area protected by the opponent player. The game counts the goals the players have scored, and they can agree to play either for a limited amount of time, or until either of them has scored a certain amount of goals.
The players can play the game with their hands or other real-world objects. The game physics simulate the behaviour of a real ball, except that the virtual ball doesn't slow down at all.
Yes, of course it would be possible, but I don't work for a software synthesizer manufacturer, I work for a hardware synthesizer manufacturer.
We actually make money (soft synth guys don't, pity for them). This means it is more seductive for someone to require us to license something like this technology.
We'd rather just come up with it ourselves.
Either way though, the lesson to be learnt from MIT is that there is a loooot of room for improvement in the control surface side of things.
(We know that already, though.)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --