Monome 128

After several months on a waiting list, my Monome128 arrived last week. A Monome is a hand built walnut wood and aluminium box with 128 buttons lit by 128 LEDs - designed primarily for making weirdy electronic music. All Monomes are built by a couple of guys in Philadelphia, who promise economic and ecological sustainability in their design and production. Everything is open source, from the firmware to the PCB schematics, and many people create their own. You can even build them from an Arduino. It communicates with the computer using the OpenSound Control protocol, and all functionality is programmed from the host machine. Max/MSP is popular on Windows and OS X, but you can also use Pure Data and ChucK on Linux. I've not had a chance to look too closely, but my plan is to develop a step-sequencer with bouncing blocks and gravity, something that can help realise my own particular brand of self-indulgent monotony. I'll let you know the date of my first gig...

monome 128 noodle from Graham Morrison on Vimeo.