Kinect As A Music Controller

[braincell]

They hacked the Wii controller for music but actually the Kinect will have PC drivers within a year of release. I hope to see some good music apps for it. The Kinect is different because it uses cameras to sense your whole body motions. It remains to be seen how fast and how precise it is. Formerly this was called "Project Natal."

[siriusbliss]

Friends of mine worked on video-driven music interfaces going back years now.
Music apps exist. Other than that I'm under non-disclosure
Xbox engineers were snooping around last year and decided to try to steal the tech. rather than license it.

Good thing they only think in terms of stupid 3D video games rather than throwing sound around in a room and composing in mid-air.

Video is light-years faster response than infrared.

G

[braincell]

It doesn't matter how they think (or don't think) because once it's in Windows, developers can do what they want with it. Imagine someone producing music and video at the same time.

[Zer]

hopefully it will be a she-male then....everything else would lead into crab.

[braincell]

I would like to see something which is a cross between first person shooters and guitar hero.

[siriusbliss]

The developers I've worked with have gone way beyond those boring shoot-em, mimick-them, follow-the-leader interfaces and paradigms.
It's all been done.

Greg

[kensuguro]

Imagine someone producing music and video at the same time.

That would be rather dull, as it's been the "new" thing for the past 20 years. On the other hand, for stage equipment, an xbox might be really nice since it is a relatively dependable piece of hardware (compared to buggy OS), and developers know the hardware very well. Might end up being a solid piece of equipment for VJs.. much better than clunky max/msp+jitter patches or pd patches forced to interface with some home made device.

but then again, I guess the clunkiness is part of what wins the hearts of the purists eh..

I think with these things, it's part technology, but it's also trying to come up with ways to use the data acquired.. positional information is xy, or xyz, but to go beyond a chaos pad, or just mapping them to whatever parameters (that are fully knob tweakable anyway) is a fun challenge. Though we know a bunch about building interfaces, studies on what makes sense, or takes full advantage of the particular context (hand motion, fully body motion, etc) I feel is very limited. It's also quite unfortunate that for many of the people in the forefront, new technology boils down to mangling some audio with a hand build granular synth, masking the inadequacy of the technology but at the same losing precise control and sense of artistic expression. To such a degree that the sort of chaos has become an integral feature of the genre (pointing at academic electroacoustic music). Throw in a couple of classically trained cellists and violinists and you've got yourself a proper graduation recital. The equation seems to have been reduced to "something that a 23 year old can throw together in 1 semester, and can write a paper about".

It is an interesting topic though, and should be explored much more. Having better technology definitely helps. Just people need to think more about what to do with it. Building synths around the input method is interesting. It's very hard to make anything useful though.. that's the hard part.

[braincell]

What has been done Greg? A symphony has been done so why write a symphony? I believe that games are the future of all entertainment and music. We will still have old forms just as we still have AM radio and Broadway Musicals but they will have decreasing importance. Shoot-em up games might be boring to you but the market says otherwise and I love them. I like that in some games, there is no requirement to finish missions and that you can go your own way and even use it as social media. I wish Microsoft would do something closer to Second Life. Maybe not all user content but more user content, rendering video on a super computer at the host site.

[garyb]

let's just get that direct feed into the brain, hmmm? this third party object(the pc) in between the software, user, and internet is so inefficient! direct injection is the way of the future! yum!

[siriusbliss]

What has been done Greg? A symphony has been done so why write a symphony? I believe that games are the future of all entertainment and music. We will still have old forms just as we still have AM radio and Broadway Musicals but they will have decreasing importance. Shoot-em up games might be boring to you but the market says otherwise and I love them. I like that in some games, there is no requirement to finish missions and that you can go your own way and even use it as social media. I wish Microsoft would do something closer to Second Life. Maybe not all user content but more user content, rendering video on a super computer at the host site.

Not everyone has written a symphony, or has musical background to compose such, and a HUGE market exists that doesn't give a shit about 'social' media, or virtual worlds, or shoot-em up games.

Give people parameters to build things they haven't been able to do before - in real time- and the whole game changes.
What I've seen (and been involved in) goes way beyond virtual realities or virtual social context, or ever-more collages of just throwing elements together.

There's a whole different paradigm emerging that the 'big market' doesn't even know about. And it goes way beyond the current structural context that doesn't even use the whole brain or 'true' creative centers of the brain. Just roaming around a virtual world or rendering video on a central server somewhere is a short-sided destination - just another collage. Nothing wrong with it, it just falls way short of what I've seen.

Now we're getting caught up in the 'tiny window' of ipads and smartphones, which is a whole other issue.

Greg

[garyb]

cortical implants solve all those problems....

[next to nothing]

cortical implants solve all those problems....

[garyb]

cortical implants would solve THOSE problems, too!

[Neutron]

I saw a demo of kinekt and the guy was running and jumping over hurdles, it looked like the jump on screen was about half a second later then him actually jumping.

[braincell]

It could be faster in the final release.