I remember seeing a prototype of this about two years back, and a few days ago I again stumbled upon something called Monome. It’s a really interesting experiment in design and interaction by way of a silver slab of shiny metal with 64 buttons on its face. What you do with them, however, is where things get interesting. Primarily, it’s been used as an interface for MIDI software applications, with each button acting as a trigger for a sound byte; this allows for some unbelievable live performances, with the actual construction of the song being a performance in and of itself. Several examples of this can be seen in the videos on the site.
The real beauty of Monome, however, is that it gives tactility to what is usually cumbersome software. Say, for instance, you want to create a song with several looping instruments. To do this, you need only select buttons on the grid which correspond with sound files on your computer. As seen below, a sweeping bar of illumination literally passes over the buttons you selected in chronological order, playing its assigned sound, and voilà, a song.
The best thing is that this is just one out of a near endless amount of ways you can interact with Monome. More or less, the only limitation to its flexibility in how the buttons interact with your computer and how you interact with the buttons, is your imagination (and some software, too).
Sometimes it takes something really simple in design to allow room for extensibility, in this case via ingenuity and creativity on the users’ end. Monome is a shining example of this.
