Monome 256

[Antimon]

Christmas arrived early for me along with my Monome 256 a couple of days ago (image from monome's site). Here are some first impressions:

It's a 16 by 16 matrix of silicon buttons with orange leds under them. The functionality of the hardware is easy to sum up: if you press a button, a command is sent to the host saying which button was pressed or released. You can also send commands from the host telling the monome to light or darken specific buttons. That's it! There are a number of applications (Max/Msp or ChucK) that you can download from monome's site. You will have an application called monomeserial running that translates the USB protocol to OSC or MIDI.

The action of the keys is a bit stiff, and some require a steady hand if you want to keep holding them down. With some practice this shouldn't be a big problem. For sequencing programs this is no problem at all, but the first thing I did was write an accordeon thingy where you play it like a keyboard. A great feeling to see it light up my dark room while playing pads. Some react to it being pretty small - side is 27 cm / 10,5 inches.

There is a sense of freedom that I get from this thing. I no longer have to accept whatever interface that manufacturers of instruments present to me, I make that interface myself. Even if it's just buttons. Let's see if that kind of feeling stays. Also, the kind of logic that the OSC protocol uses (x/y coordinates in the simplest way, a prefix string instead of a midi channel) fits better in my programmer's brain than, say, arranging a number of MIDI control numbers on a BCR2000. There are one or two obstacles that disappears between me and the sound generator.

There is lots of information and docs on monome.org, including how to pick the unit apart, what the low level USB protocol looks like, and "getting started" tutorials.

One issue that will probably pop up is remembering what I programmed each button to do.

Monome combined with ChucK (or similar OSC-enabled programming language) feels like a powerful team.

/Stefan

P.S. is there something wrong with the spellchecker? I get a blank window in Safari.

[blue hell]