Cubled is an interactive installation made of 27 luminous spheres arranged in space to create a cube 5 mt (16.4ft) per side floating on a stage.

The project created by Giuseppe Acito of Opificio Sonico  has a structure made of steel wires, RGB LED Strips and Ikea paper lanterns.

The system is MIDI-controlled, the notes generated by a sequencer are converted to electric signals using an Arduino UNO and a Mosfet:

No DMX device was used for this system which is 12V DC powered, with slim electric wires in order to give the lightness needed to this installation. In this clip, the performance is splitted in 2 parts: in the first a kit of electronic percussion is “played” live by a step sequencer named Sonic Fraction Beatdown (a Max\MSP device for Ableton Live), the combinations of 12 MIDI notes generated are linked to the spheres. In the second part the combinations of sounds and lights are pre-programmed patterns clip and performed live by a Tenori-on Yamaha and Ableton Live. The installation was mounted inside the Link Club (Bologna – Italy) in December 2013, which hosted some world-famous DJ set, during a month of permanence.

Once again Amanda Ghassaei sent a cool project she’s been working on lately as an extension of the work she’s been doing on the monome project. Sugarcube is an open source, grid-based, standalone MIDI instrument  self-contained and relatively cheap to make. It communicates via a MIDI output with other electronic MIDI instruments and software environments like Ableton and MaxMSP.

An Arduino Uno generates all of its MIDI data and drives LEDS, buttons, a 2 axis gyroscope, a 3 axis accelerometer,  two potentiometers, and the whole device is powered by a lithium-polymer battery making it pretty portable.

She published detailed  documentation on Instructables to make one yourself   and shared a bunch of videos to discover its main features:

Basically this project is:

A portable, Arduino-powered, grid-based MIDI controller that boots up into a variety of apps to do lots of things with sound. The controller has 16 backlit buttons, used as both inputs and outputs to give the controller some visual feedback. 2 potentiometers give analog control, depending on the app the pots are assigned to tempo, MIDI velocity, pitch, and scrolling (making the avaible grid space larger than 4×4). An x/y accelerometer and an x/y gyroscope add some playful, gestural control to the device; most of the apps implement a “shake to erase” control and several respond to tilt in various ways.

It boots up into 7 different apps, though it has the potential to boot up into 16 total. This device is primarily a MIDI controller, but I’ve also written an app that allows you to pull the button and analog data into MaxMSP and to control audio.

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With this project, I was interested in making a device that was a little more self-contained and relatively cheap to make (lots of buttons = lots of $). In keeping more with the concept of the tenori-on, this controller does all its app processing itself, it does not rely on a computer to process button presses/analog controls into MIDI. This means you can plug it directly into a synth or any device that understands MIDI and you’re good to go, no computer required. It runs off a beefy LiPo battery that keeps it running for days on a charge, so it’s fairly portable as well. In keeping with the monome side of things, it’s totally open source and can be adapted to your particular audio setup/needs. All the Arduino code is up on github, along with a MaxMSP patch that decodes data from the controller into something usable in Max.