monome 64 tilt

Musical instruments allow musicians to directly manipulate sound with their hands. There is no latency, the physical and audible feedback is instantaneous and corresponds to physical laws that human beings understand intuitively. Technology is gradually providing new opportunities for expression and I feel we're still in the infancy of instruments coupled with microprocessors. It has only been 30 years since the Prophet 5. What we're doing today is very primitive, but we're progressing to a future where composers may, for example, shape compositions in real time like molding clay.

I received my 64 yesterday. The monome 64 includes X/Y tilt sensors. I'm using a small application to trigger notes, sent to my modular via a MIDI to CV interface. Another Max patch is gently massaging the output of the tilt sensors to a roughly 0-127 range. After some post interface smoothing via a lag processor, the tilt is directly controlling a VCA and filter cutoff, so I'm articulating the notes with the physical movement of the device.

Later in the video, I'm also routing the tilt sensor to control the rate of an LFO which is triggering an envelope of another VCA which is gating the output.




Here is the source if you're interested.