The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'electroplankton'

2006/7/25

The creator of the Electroplankton game/generative music tool for the Nintendo DS, Toshio Iwai, has developed a new electronic musical instrument. Known as the Tenori-On, it's an electronic tablet containing a 16x16 grid of LED-illuminated pushbutton; it can be used as a loop-based sequencer, or played in more game-like modes:

Each of Tenori-On's LED buttons can either be lightly strummed, sort of like a harp, or alternatively pressed down, whereby each button lights up. Musical notes are triggered by a regular line of light that moves from left to right, much like the sweeping line in PSP game Lumines.
Perhaps most interesting are the more game-like modes, where you can set off Breakout or Pong-style music balls that 'bounce' around the grid, triggering new sets of dynamics sound. These can be layered on top of the more traditional music making modes, creating what Iwai called, "a real musical instrument for our digital age, just like the Theremin was for the 20th Century."
No idea when (or even if) it'll go to market, though Yamaha seem to have the rights to it.

(via Boing Boing) art electroplankton music tech tenori-on toshio iwai 3

2006/2/15

The Nintendo DS, sometimes dismissed as the Sony PSP's poor cousin, is starting to look like an interesting platform. For one, whilst Sony's unit is largely dominated by fairly conservative mainstream fare like driving/sports/gang-warfare/first-person-shooter games, the dinky DS, which lacks the raw power to compete in the graphics-machismo stakes but has two screens, one of them touch-sensitive, and a microphone, has been capitalising on this with more conceptual and experimental titles. One which has been raved about recently is Electroplankton, an artificial-life-based algorithmic-music-composition game/toy/tool developed by Japanese multimedia artist Toshio Iwai. Electroplankton was apparently the most popular Japanese import to the US, though now has been released there, and at least one musician has made an album using it, and is using it in live performances.

On a more practical note, the Opera web browser is about to be released for the DS; Opera will be a cartridge which allows users to browse the web via Wi-Fi from their DS. I wonder how long until Skype or someone release a VOIP cartridge, turning the DS into an internet telephony handset.

Meanwhile, some hobbyist hackers have written a personal organiser package for the DS. It's a download, and needs some hacking to get it to work. And someone else is manufacturing and selling cartridges for running homebrew software on a DS. The PassMe cartridges plug into the cartridge port and take a legitimate game cartridge, which they use for authenticating the code downloaded onto them as legitimate; they are used for running homebrew titles, and absolutely not, it must be stressed, p1r4t3d games. It's not quite clear how one downloads the software image onto the cartridge, though; I imagine it may use proprietary software, possibly running only on Windows.

(via Make, Boing Boing) copyfight electroplankton homebrew nintendo ds opera toshio iwai web 0

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