November 16, 2008

More Wii Theremin Videos

Videos of me playing my homemade Wii Theremin.

Star Trek Theme:




Sound Play:


Credit and many thanks to my wife, Kali, who lit and recorded all my shots and tolerated days of miserable noisemaking!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great just.Awesome, We more Theremin!! And a little less cowbell.

Anonymous said...

Hi there, I'm looking for a way to give my girlfriend access to a theremin. Despite the fact that a real Theremin looks quite cool it's really expensive, so I thought about purchasing a wiimote and look for ways to use that device and imitate a thereminlike playing by hooking it up to appropriate software.

Few questions:
1) your software interfacing with the wiimote - is it OpenSource :)

2) do you know any prebuilt interfacing software I could use to interface the remote with midi-based production software?

3) How did you build the golves? I know a tiny bit of physical computing as well as a tiny bit of programming - mere noob knowledge. Yet, are there any schematics you could share (there has to be some way the Infrared Leds don't eat up the batteries in minutes)

Anyways, great work, man!

Ken Moore said...

Hey ndo, unfortunately the software isn't in a shareable state. It's pretty hacky now and customized to my particular synthesizer which is a rather expensive part of the equation.

Leslie Sanford published a C# MIDI toolkit which may come in handy for you: (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/MIDIToolkit.aspx). I'm not aware of other general toolkits like that though there must be others.

For the gloves, it's really basic - a 1.5 volt AA battery connected directly to an IR LED (see my post on making IR LED light pens which is a similar design). I put a switch inline to turn it off without having to remove the battery. I know very little about electronics, but I think the LED is well matched to the battery - they seem to last a long while.

I hope this helps!