Synapse Turns Your Kinect Into A Dubstep Theremin

kinect_dubstep_theremin

[Ryan Challinor] is part of a group constructing a display for this year’s Burning Man festival that includes the Kinect, Ableton Live, and Quartz Composer. As the programming guru of the project, he was tasked with creating a method for his partners to utilize all three products via an easy to use interface.

His application is called Synapse and was inspired by videos he saw online of people controlling individual Dubstep beats or sound effects with the Kinect. Synapse allows you to map multiple effects to each limb, sending joint positions, hit events, and image depth data to both Ableton and Quartz Composer via OSC. The user interface looks fairly easy to work with, enabling musicians and artists to create awesome audio/visual displays using their bodies as instruments, in a very short period of time.

Check out the pair of videos below to see a brief walkthrough of the software interface as well as a quick video demonstration of what Synapse is capable of.

[via KinectHacks]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teHCHsjxI00&w=470]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ge7RcIBWsc&w=470]

12 thoughts on “Synapse Turns Your Kinect Into A Dubstep Theremin

  1. Ok, now….. only thing I wan’t to know is how long before some one… (starring at SquarEnix) designs an rpg where your spells are controlled by you in this manner. Imagine spell potency depends on your ability to make a pattern… magic rune kind of thing can use a wand I guess but this would be better. you could target direction too probably.

  2. What I want is a device that eliminates all dubstep soundwaves within a three mile radius!

    @Grovenstein,

    if you are talking about the same D ream as i’m thinking of, the keyboardist is now a professor of physics at Manchester university and is basically never off the BBC.

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