A few weeks ago I acquired what is probably the most awesome “instrument” I have ever owned: the monome. It’s a seemingly simple device but with an open standard (it communicates in serial via the USB port, and an app called monomeserial converts the stream into either MIDI or OSC) one can do virtually anything with it – except maybe make a cup of coffee.
The monome community is thriving with very enthusiastic people with a common passion in both music and computers, and has a strong “open source” philosophy wherein information is exchanged and communicated freely. There is no greater proof of this than the monome itself – the hardware specs is open, free for anyone to use and build one for himself.
So being all these things it was very easy for me to get drawn and warm up to this crowd and their ethos of sharing, not unlike what Prof. Lawrence Lessig and co. are currently doing with Creative Commons. I really dig this movement, a movement that encourages the proliferation of culture through less draconian copyright (the CC counterpoint is called “copyleft”) laws that severely lock down creative works.
Idealisms aside, I love my monome. The community – like I said, a bunch of computer whizkids – has come up with tons of apps for it, and I have only scratched the surface.
Here is the first song I was able to make with the monome’s help. All parts were recorded, created, looped in Ableton Live, with the monome acting as controller (clip launcher), through the use of the pages app.
Being that the arrangement was done “live”, meaning the loops were triggered in realtime, I made it a point to record the action:
Not that I was doing anything significant… like other instruments, it takes practice to gain skill in the art of monome-ing. Next time, fingers will hopefully be busy with actual playing – nay, comandeering – of the tunes.