Hi! Did you know that you can use your Kinect to control your sequencer/operating system?
1. My inspiration for getting one of my own
First, my music therapist father showed me this amazing Soundbeam video. It's fascinating and inspiring to see how so severly disabled people can still participate in music.
He did however think it could be improved, both regarding interactivity and musicality:
(It's also way overpriced, but works out of the box)
I then quickly stumbled across a video that inspired me to get a Kinect of my own. Chris Vik developed some software for it, which he used to control a 4-story pipe organ!
3. My second experiment: Triggering clips and keystroke sequences with movement gestures (jumping, flexing my biceps)
The jump triggers a key press, which is converted to a keystroke sequence (alt+f - down - down - right - enter), which opens the most recent project in Ableton Live. The other ones also trigger key presses, which trigger clips in Ableton Live (key mapping; CTRL+K)
- MIDI Yoke - Virtual MIDI port.
- NI Mate - Tracks various body parts, and converts the data to MIDI or OSC.
- FAAST - Allows you to define intricate gestures and outputs.
- Bome's MIDI Translator Pro - Used to output keystroke sequences.
- Windows Speech Recognition Macros - Say sentence - output keystrokes or other control features. (Basic speech recognition is a built-in feature in Windows 7)
- Piz MIDI VST plugins - Convert CC from NI Mate to notes, specify scales, and much more.
There's also a few other solutions I haven't tested thoroughly yet, such as Kinectar, Gesture Studio and GesturePak. More experiments are coming!
Looney4Clooney
i would use max msp and jitter for this sort of thing which is convenient because it comes with ableton.
tehlord
Jean Michelle Jarre did this with ing lasers 30 years ago.
Rognalf
Looney4Clooney: It wasn't included with Live 8, which I use, but seems like it's time to upgrade.
tehlord: True. And the Kinect doesn't output lasers. It would be interesting to connect it to a light unit.