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Monome

16.Oct.2008

It was through a video on Vimeo that I found out about this wonderful piece of hardware: Monome. It has become to me a great example of two things: of how it’s possible with such a simple interface to develop an enormous variety of applications; and of how it’s possible to release a product only as a platform with no immediate value to the consumers, but enabling them to create their own product experience through the right open tools.

Monome is just a simple rectangular board with a matrix of buttons containing a single led. There are different sizes available. It connects to a PC through an USB cable and comes with a SDK that enables full control of board. And from here, it’s all creativity. There are already many libraries released developed by customers, specially music related, like integrations with Ableton Live. Here’s a wonderful demo sequence from one of those libraries:

shado on the monome 128 from cassiel on Vimeo.

And there are hundreds of more videos demonstrating uses for Monome. Unfortunately there aren’t any units actually for sale. There have been some weekly auctions for individual units only. This makes them an even more desired good, at least for me.

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2 Comments

The Nine Inch Nails are known to use it, and they are probably using it live on their current tour. You can see two on this video, with Alessandro using one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsF9DVKSnP0 And i'm not sure if the device on this one is related to it or not: http://www.pitchfork.tv/special-presentation/nine-inch-nails-live-from-rehearsals

tiago rodrigues / 16.Oct.2008 at 05:52pm

The device from the second video doesn't seemed related. It's a device with touch screen that happens to have the same kind of software for beats. But I liked to see the use they gave the Monome on the first video.

I need one of those =P