Pocketmints

Last Tuesday Russ Maschmeyer stopped in to tell us about his latest project, MOTIV.

“MOTIV is an open source project that uses Xbox Kinect to give digital musicians direct control of emotional expression by interpreting their physical gestures in real-time.”

After an entertaining demonstration, the presentation turned into an insightful conversation on the potential of gestural interfaces in digital music. Here are three things I took away from the discussion:

• Electronic music has historically been ‘too good’ at playing the right notes at the right time. MOTIV was created to focus on the human elements of performance such as variations in tempo, note velocity & instrumental layering.
• Not being a programmer shouldn’t prevent you from taking on an ambitious code-project. Although, simultaneously learning C++, Ableton Live & MaxMSP under a tight deadline will cause you pain.
• Chris Vik (aka Synaecide) is another guy creating dubstep in this space. He’s got some excellent videos online.

Here’s what the rest of the evening looked like:

We hope you’ll be able to join us for our next talk on July 19th, where Chris Haseman will be talking about Designing for Android. Join up here.