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Announcing Loop Motion

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to get my hands on a developer unit of the Leap Motion device. This device will become available in Best Buy stores in May. In my initial brainstorming quite a few ideas came up, mostly around audio and sound…

Back in the mid-late 90’s a couple of friends and I spent a lot of time writing lyrics and making hip hop beats on our computers. Some of us ‘evolved’ from there and went onto hardware-only configurations. Back in the day the industry has relied on physical drum machines (like the legendary TR-909), but nowadays there are hardware/software solutions. There are arguments for using each, but either way you cut it, none of this is cheap.

How about a software solution which relies of inexpensive ‘hardware’, but it is ‘hardware’ that you never have to touch? Can we have a drum machine that is not a machine at all, but interacts with your hands just like one?

So currently I have a new software project underway called “Loop Motion”. It is passed the prototype stage, and now a working version is already in early production. Some of the features I hope to achieve are:

  • Touch-less, velocity sensitive hand gestures for ‘beating’ on virtual drum pads
  • Visualization of beats played
  • Real-time recording of notes played by gestures
  • Looped playback of the last recorded sequence while recording the next sequence
  • Variable length bars and tempo control
  • Load your own sound font or map notes to the virtual drum pads
  • Multitrack support*
  • Visualization of bars on tracks*
  • Multiple instrument support*
  • Effects*

*Items for future consideration, definitely not to be expected in version 1.0

This is a little different than any software project I’ve worked on these past twelve years, but I think it will be fun. Enjoy some photos for the meantime.