Create Digital Music » Video: DJing and VJing with Nintendo Wii Remote

Jan 18 2007

Video: DJing and VJing with Nintendo Wii Remote

While music manufacturers struggle to create “integrated hardware solutions”, enterprising DJs and VJs are picking up US$40 Nintendo Wii remotes and having a blast. Here, the controller gets assigned to audio filters on the computer (I’m guessing the Max/MSP/Jitter external may be at work as it’s on a Mac), and controls glitchy visuals. I’ve been working with the Wii myself, and I’m not quite satisfied with the gestures I’ve gotten out of it yet — just as some of the early launch title games for Wii may not quite have the control scheme perfected yet, so, too, are these early performance attempts a bit limited. But another six months to a year, some more code, and I’m sure we’ll being having Wii DJ/VJ battles.

Thanks to Douglas Mullins for the tip!

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11 Comments

Dri

Most people with MPC’s never both to find the function to trigger a sample’s start time based on the velocity of its triggering, such that a soft vel starts at 0, whilst a harder vel starts further into the sample. Imagine this stuff translated into Wii controllers, or at the very least to trigger the samples the same but the increased gyroscopic intensity influence the visuals more… so someone can ROCK THE HELL OUT with a Wii controller, have the same rocking audio by the visual feedback be more intense.

Or we could all play Spore and never leave the house.

Im about 50/50 on that decision right now… :P

January 19, 2007 @ 12:02 am

CM

The guy next is also looks to be rocking the DS, probably the wireless MIDI app.

January 19, 2007 @ 12:23 am

maleman

Hey, this is off-topic, but what I’d *really* like to hear is some news on the portable recorder front… any updates or new compactflash offerings??? A MicroTrack II?

January 19, 2007 @ 9:29 am

Thom

This piece should have been about how the Wii-mote can be use to distract people from shit music.

“Ignore the music…just watch me wave this around like a monkey.”

January 19, 2007 @ 10:41 am

Peter Kirn

We’ve got lots more NAMM news. I thought I’d give us a brief break before digging back into the press release stack. I expect we won’t have gotten through all the major stuff until the end of next week. Josh, our roving reporter, has had limited Web access, so we’ll have photos and stories from him, as well.

The new recorders both came from Korg, one ultra-portable, one semi-portable.

Hmmm, Thom, you’re giving me ideas … if I can just have enough stuff to wave at people to distract them… excellent. ;)

January 19, 2007 @ 11:30 am

Joaquins Musikblog

DJ mit Nintenod Wii-Remote

Und ein weiteres Beispiel, dass sich die Nntendo Wii-Remote, zum musizieren und Steuern in der Musik, immer mehr Freunde macht.

WÃ¤rend die Musikindustrie immer wieder auf der Suche, nach geeigneten und neuen SteuergerÃ¤ten ist, kaufen sich Musikschaf

January 19, 2007 @ 6:52 pm

Carl Lumma

I dunno, nothing in this video makes it obvious the wiimote is even hooked up. Kinda like those iTunes visualizations that really don’t react to what we hear in music very well. Of course our brain is aggressive in detecting correlations, even when none exist. I once informally quizzed people at a party with Winamp, with the visualizations running off a different audio source than the music being heard, and they all said the performance of the visualization was very good.

The “latency” apparent in the other wiimote/music demos I’ve seen also has been disappointing.

-Carl

January 19, 2007 @ 9:02 pm

Peter Kirn

I tend to agree, but we have a number of different elements:

* Hardware latency (which I’ve found to be fairly minimal)
* How to use something rather indirect (accelerometer!) for control — which could add additional perceived latency
* How it feels to play the thing
* What people perceive

To me, the perception is the least important — I’ve written music for dance that doesn’t really fit with the dance, in which people add the correlation; that can be exciting to me. But we’re clearly not to the point where this thing feels great to play; that is important. I think it’s a matter of doing something useful with the input data, and it’s not easy.

Back to patching/programming. ;)

January 19, 2007 @ 9:22 pm

Stefan

I guess only the Myspace “equalizer” gives me less of a correlational feeling then that guy waving around some piece of white plastic supposedly influencing the sound output.

January 19, 2007 @ 9:52 pm

felix

To me it looked like the more he waved the wiimote, the glitchier the sound got. Of course this could have been a phantom pattern generated by my brain.

Any infos on who the artist is, what music he was playing?

BTW – nice site!

January 21, 2007 @ 10:25 pm

DR. Spock invents new dj tool at djtechtools.com

[...] Â Apparently, they have been working on this since 2002 but it looks like a really bad corporate super bowl ring to me. Apparently this allows you to scratch in the air and jump to different points of the song using hand movements. Sick!! Some folks have also been working on this idea but using the Nintendo WII platform as a dj tool. [...]