Some of our email exchanges posted here for the record…

17 March – Anthony:

Finally got to your thread on the blog.  Here’s my thoughts:

Using the Monome to control sound on Martyn’s 3D-AudioScape should be technically fairly straight forward, as would the visualisation grid.  MIDI to OSC is no problem.  I don’t know much about DMX, but I think I did a student project a couple of years ago that used DMX…  or there are hardware solutions to convert between MIDI/DMX (e.g. http://www.lanbox.com/products/LCDataSheet.html – about GBP350 – no idea how good they are).  I’ll have a think…

I’m interested in that hack that allows you to control per LED brightness – that would rock; have you got it to work? It might make my camera thing make sense for a start.  I’ll fiddle with the accelerometer thing too – it wasn’t incorporated into the download when I first installed the Monome, so I haven’t used it yet

As for discome – getting the Monome to trigger discrete animations onscreen is fine, but doing any kind of animation on the Monome itself is doable but won’t look any good – as you found out yourself, 8×8 is very small to make meaningful graphics…

20 March – Anthony:

this is interesting :  http://monolake.de/installations/cyclone.html

i’m warming to the 3D sound interface idea

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Trial using the accelerometer in a Monome 64 (http://www.monome.org) to create a new interface for the old mobile phone game Snake. Works out to be very tactile, intuitive, responsive and quite fun.

Tilty Snake from squidie on Vimeo.

My 9 year old son got so involved he nearly threw the thing across the floor in frustration when the snake finally bit it.

Update (17th May):

After posting to the monome.org community forum this video was featured on the main News section and has since received over 8,250 views… wow!

(This entry written for Martyn Ware… but could be useful to others…)

The monome.org site has lots of useful information, tutorials, apps and patches… but is, typically of open source communities (though better than most), messy and a bit difficult to find your way round if you’re new to it. The best place to start is the new monome docs and in particular the setup section…

To get the monome up and running you’ll need the following essential (E) and recommended (R) drivers & software:

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This post is partly a response to Ant’s most recent email to me:
“I’m feeling slightly up a blind alley with the Monome at the moment. It’s a wonderful piece of hardware, it’s beautiful, fast, flexible etc but utterly meaningless at the moment. I can’t think of an interesting way to use it.”

I wanted to update my profile at monome.org with a photo and some info – now that I’m starting to post regularly. I was thinking about suitable 1 bit 8×8 pixel graphics – and thought of Space Invaders (obviously)… and tracked down (with surprising difficulty) a set of characters in this Invader from Space font. It turns out most of them aren’t actually 8×8 pixels 🙁 – but there are a few that are and I’ve chosen my favourite 😉

We haven’t had a chance to meet and really talk in the past few weeks – since getting the devices in fact – so I thought that a bit of critical reflection might help Ant understand my perspectives – and let me highlight some illustrative examples – and that might help him… possibly…

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