Electroplankton inventor's new musical instrument
My favorite Nintendo DS title is Electroplankton, a music synthesizer that lets anyone create pleasant music.
The creator of Electroplankton, Toshio Iwai, made a standalone synthesizer for Yamaha called the Tenori-On, and Chris Pirillo reviewed it on his video program. He loves the $1200 instrument. I can't wait for the price to drop to about $250. Link
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Don't hold your breath Mark. I'm still waiting for Moog synthesizers to drop below $1,000. It's only been 40+ years. Should happen any day now. The Tenori-on will still be $800 used 10 years from now.
There is probably an argument to be made here about how $1200 is actually what something is worth, and our expectations for it to cost less (Im in the $199 range or so) probably wont happen until yamaha kicks in the mass sweatshop scale levels of productions, so it can be at the price us amuricans have grown accustomed to paying for electronic goods.
What would an IPOD cost on a one off or short run basis?
Oooo, shiny. Me want.
The sad thing is that Electroplankton costs almost as much nowadays.
Well, I'm exaggerating terribly, but it seems there's a lot of out-of-print DS software that's fetching $50 or more on eBay/Amazon. This makes me a sad gamer.
Also, Joel was covering the Tenori-On a couple months back, and it looks like something I'd enjoy quite a bit, having dabbled with creating little tunes on the Game Boy Camera.
No midi, fixed soundbank, black box algos, too expensive to accommodate a large scale bending project. Nice try, but it's an overpriced shadow of what it could have been.
Shame, really. Good thing we have monomes.
You want something really expensive , try getting something like a single coke can made in a custom size. I'm sure that a one off iPod would cost less.
Anyway, as soon as the developer kits for the iPhone and the iPod touch come out, I think there are going to be some pretty interesting virtual instruments made for it with these sorts of interfaces.
I have a distinct feeling that this has a good possibility of becoming the geek fetish item of 2008.
If I had $1200 to blow on this, I would in a heartbeat.
I still have SimTunes somewhere in my house.
Musicthing's review is enlightening (and disappointing)
Summary: It's not particularly *bad*, but looks and feels like a Toy, which is a bit less than what you'd expect for a $1200 gizmo.
A Moog is expensive, because they're produced domestically in small batches by a tiny company. Likewise, a Moog contains a fully-analogue synthesis pipeline, and is built like a tank (like all decent pro audio gear should be!). It's very easy to see how the material costs represent a big enough portion of the price for me to be reasonably confident that Moog aren't ripping me off.
On the other hand, the Yamaha product doesn't look like it's particularly expensive to build. $1200 is inexcusably high.
A better, and cheaper alternative is the Monome, which is produced by a *really* small company (ie. they have 2 full-time employees). It's essentially a "dumb" USB control surface version of the Tenori-On.
It's a really solid piece of kit, and the guys who make it strongly encourage users to hack and develop their own applications for it. What's not to love?
Production runs are hilariously small, so you'll be hard pressed to be able to actually find one. Still, if you're in the market for this sort of thing, Monome is clearly the way to go.
how yamaha got away with ripping off the build-it-yourself and open-source monome ive no idea.
And ive still no idea how it works!
What about the Monome (monome.org) They've been building something strangely similar for a couple of years now, for around $200-400, and it's all open source.
The sell out fast, but they are awesome devices. As far as I can tell they invented that style of device.
Also, they were at the last Make:Philly events, and gave an awesome talk (check it out at http://www.philebrity.com/2007/12/18/technologicology-proof-that-geeks-that-make-stuff-are-sexy/#more-10730).
I've played a Tenori-On the same day I've tried Elektroplankton (Summer 2005), so I wouldn't call it new ... but, yeah, it's been commercially available for only a few months now :-)
The Monome is far better for musicians and hackers alike, but the Tenori-On is great for dilletantes. Anyone who enjoys making funny bleeps with this has my blessing -- as long as they use headphones ;-p
Oh, one more thing, re Farmckon's comment: The Monome's aren't that cheap, the largest one costs more than a Tenori-On.
I went to the Tenori-On launch in London in 2007; Toshio Iwai spoke, presenting a history of his interactive music/art projects. It was quite interesting; he had been working in a similar field since the late 1980s/early 1990s, though most of his works were installations in galleries, and Electroplankton and the Tenori-On were the first two works of his that were actual consumer products.
There were demonstrations of the Tenori-On in action, as well as tethered demo units. I got to play with one; it was fun, though probably the sort of thing one would play with for a while and then put aside. One would have to be quite rich to spend £600 (the asking price) on one.
If there's enough of a market, maybe some Chinese company will do a cheap, cool-looking and largely unusable knockoff, à la the "Vii" videogame unit. Then again, China has its own high-tech art scene which has leveraged cheap manufacturing (coming up with things like the Buddha Machine); perhaps someone will come up with some ridiculously cheap device with a touchscreen, a sound chip and firmware that makes it do cool things?