The developers of the Monome, a minimalist-but-clever button-covered box say, "The wonderful thing about this device is that is doesn't do anything really. It wasn't intended for any specific application. We'll make several applications, and others will make more. We hope to share as many of these as possible. Drum machines, loopers, 1-bit video transformers, physics models, virtual sliders, math games, etc."

This new interface, is almost impossible to describe, but check out the video, it seems to be surprisingly flexible and fast to use. A year ago, the Monome was the Bitbox, a crude wooden box covered in illuminated momentary push-button switches. It had some early software developed in MAX/MSP which triggered a different sample on each row. Now, there are a range of interesting applications using OSC and MIDI, and the box is going into small-time production.


In February, the Philly-based development team bought 13,000 diodes from Digikey, and they’re currently building the first batch of 200 units, 8 x 8 grids which will sell for $500 with a USB interface and a bundle of open-source software.