Japanese Theremin for the 21th Century
New handheld hardware from Electroplankton man
via B2 / Pocket Gamer news, 24 July 2006—Installation artist Toshio Iwai wowed the gaming world with Electroplankton, his wacky sea creature-based synthesiser for Nintendo DS. Now he’s going one stage further and launching his own handheld music-making device. Called Tenori-On, it’s a collaboration between Iwai and Japanese electronics firm Yamaha… consists of a 16 by 16 grid of LED buttons within a square aluminium frame about the same size as a lightpen tablet, and also contains two in-built speakers…. LED buttons can either be lightly strummed, sort of like a harp, or alternatively pressed down, whereby each button lights up….
Kool!
Tenori-On has sort of a “game” mode that lets you play Pong with musical pucks that ricochet on the tablet screen to make spacey chords and sounds. Go to the official Flash-infested website (both in Englsh and Japanese) to hear the weird music and to see the play concept of collaboration shown below.
UPDATE! Olly Farshi says: I filmed his impromptu mini-performance on my mobile phone.
CLICK to view ToshioIwai.mp4
ALSO: My friend Charles just provided this example of “prior art” to the Tenori-on, hee, hee.
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July 25th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
I was just asked by a musician if the Tenori-On has Midi interface for output.
Damn, if I can tell if there any midi output since there is no description of the Tenori-On device’s specifications. Meh.
While visiting the Tenori-On website I found it impossible to cut-and-paste the description of the product or point to the SPECIFIC page/information URL (because of crappy Flash design). That’s just B-A-D for publicity and PR.
Why do Japanese sites screw up such obvious needs like making the text of a Flash site available to users? Gee, like how I’m supposed to praise the Tenori-On product if I cannot refer to specific information, a URL sub-page, or quote any the contents of their site? Arrrg.
July 26th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Hi
You might be interested in this post
http://www.pixelsumo.com/post/toshio-iwai-futuresonic
And some technical info on tenori-on
http://www.pixelsumo.com/post/tenori-on
July 26th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
ThanX for the specs for the Tenori-on!
pixelsumo.com reports:
“Tenori-On uses the Midi protocol and can communicate with other Tenori-On, synchronizing them. Remote mode allows you to control Tenori-On from a PC or another Midi instrument.”
May 12th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Sweet! I feel just like I just dug up some nuggets of Au.