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.