Incredible new music production gadget...

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

I had the chance to play with one of these yesterday at the Sounds Expo in London:

http://www.jazzmutant.com/lemur_overview.php

I got to play around with it for about five minutes, and it was absolutely incredible. If you look at the top pic on the page, with the multi-colored bouncey balls, what basically occurs is that when you touch the screen, one of those balls appears for each of your fingertips. You can then flick them off in any direction, and they bounce pong-style around the screen. Once this is accomplished, you can control the speed and rotation of each bouncey ball by pressing your fingertips to the screen. The balls will act as if they're connected to your fingertips by rubber bands. You can drag them around the screen, flick them off in a different direction, whatever. You can configure them to have different amounts of friction, so they'll either bounce forever, slowly come to a halt, or stop exactly where you stop dragging your finger across the screen.

This is only one of the various UI elements, though. It has standard sliders, faders, buttons, as well as some other elements similar to the bouncey balls. The latency is essentially zero. While I was playing with it, the UI was being utilized to control various parameters in Reason. Each UI element was linked to some various parameter of an analog synth or mixer. The results were pretty insane. Easily the coolest thing I've seen in a couple of years.

The quoted price was 2000 euros. I'm too much of a slacker to do the USD conversion (plus xe.com seems to be down)

[Ron Green]

1. Sounds like the Theremin has finally come of age.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

2. Actually,

This think makes me think "kraftwerk in a box" or Tron. Either way, it's cool.

[MazeRat7]

3. Looks like a product in search of a market...

Yes it does look cool... but its yet another external control surface ? To boot, it is using OSC which has yet to be adopted by any major vendor or as an industry standard.

Oh well... guess I am jaded by the technology parade, but I see no practical use for this gadget as a musician or recording engineer.

just my $.02

MZr7

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

4. Indeed.

>Looks like a product in search of a market...

Yes, that's what I thought when I saw it sitting in the booth. Yet another goofy control surface...

>To boot, it is using OSC which has yet to be adopted by any major
>vendor or as an industry standard

Given the amount of raw data this thing was putting out, I can't see any way MIDI could accomodate it. In the setup they had going, it was connected to a new-ish PowerBook over 100Mb ethernet, and there was essentially no latency between touching the screen, the UI of the lemur reacting to your touch, and the PC-side application(s) reacting to the data from the lemur. I'm really hoping that OSC or one of its bretheren are adopted sooner, rather than later, as you could probably still integrate MIDI devices into an OSC environment with a minimum of hassle, and it would get rid of the ridiculous limitations of MIDI. I know, I know, it seems like another trendy control surface. But this one just seems different somehow... It seems like it actually works.