http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/products ... index.html
a live demo
http://vimeo.com/20858211
sadly I just read Roger Linn's page on this, and an Amazon buyout of the touchscreen company killed this instrument dead in the water.
Bastards
Then in 2009, a new company called TouchCo introduced a technology for a multi-touch, pressure-sensitive, high-resolution input surface that's also very low cost, quoting $10 per square foot in high volume. In fact, I'm using one of their technology evaluation units for the input surface in the video above. Unfortunately, Amazon bought them in January 2010 in order to add touchscreen technology to Kindle, then immediately shut them down and took their product off the market.
Alas, until someone else comes up with a similar touch technology or Amazon decides to make the TouchCo technology available, development of our product will be limited to refining our Max/MSP patch. One promising new technology we've evaluated is a touchscreen from Stantum (same company as JazzMutant, makers of the Lemur) that senses surface area of your fingers, which is not a bad alternative to sensing pressure because your finger surface area increases as you increase pressure. However, I found that their current resolution wasn't high enough for what I'm trying to do, plus true pressure sensing is better for musical control.
So given this situation, I decided to call this a research project and publish what I've done so far in an effort to get more people interested in and thinking about new musical instruments. Maybe even Jeff Bezos will read this and see that in the grand war between Kindles, iPads and Android tablets, it wouldn't be such a bad thing to permit some sort of controlled usage of the TouchCo technology.
