Media artist Toshio Iwai continues to develop stunning, fanciful ways of making music. From SONAR, here is Toshio Iwai working live with his Tenori-On music controller, in case you haven’t seen this already:

More YouTube goodness after the jump, but let’s skip ahead to the even better news: Toshio Iwai has started a development blog for the Tenori-On. Nat, the graphics designer behind Create Digital Music, has all the details on his blog onetonnemusic.

Tenori-On Report by Toshio Iwai and Tenori-On Development Team

Aside from keeping tabs on the Tenori-On, you can watch other ideas develop, like a blue-lit sound installation on a music stand. (Clever way of making that portable!) Also, in case you weren’t jealous enough of the people who got to go to SONAR, we appear to have missed what looks like a bumper car rave. Okay, I’m officially saving up miles for next year.

Videos and additional links after the jump. (Thanks to Fabio and Señor Pantalones for the tips. Okay, there’s a silly sounding sentence.)

Toshio Iwai, creator of Electroplankton, is working on a new digital musical instrument with Yamaha. It’s called the Tenori-On and, at least from an industrial design point of view, it looks beautiful. And if you’re in Spain, you can check it out live in action.

I’ve had Electroplankton for a while now, and I feel the need to document my experience. Reviews of Electroplankton in general are redundant: people either get it or they don’t. If you’re a music nerd and enjoy experimental music, you’ll love it. Enough said.

Hence, this exposition, or perhaps exposé – you choose. For anyone who came in late, Electroplankton is a title for Nintendo DS that basically has a set of 10 “minigames” that revolve around music creation.

It’s not every day a major gaming company releases a game that’s also serious interactive art and a unique way of creating music. But that’s exactly what Nintendo of America is doing today, bringing the strange and beautiful music art game ElectroPlankton to the US. (See Nintendo’s game page, press release.)

Ars Electronica is one the premiere events of the interactive tech world, and this year was apparently no exception. Good luck deciphering the stream-of-consciousness blog entries on the festival, though; I sure can’t. I’ve tried to pull some of the best references here (via a wiki of weblog action:

Ars Electronica Review [pieceofplastic.com]

Ars Electronica photostream [Flickr]

Tangible interfaces [engadgeted.net], again featuring the ReacTable — see CDM’s musical table roundup

One of the highlights was the Tenori-On, an interactive LED music toy from the creator of Nintendo’s upcoming game ElectroPlankton, as covered here before. But the coolest event sounds like the opening performance “Suspended Engines” (pictured), with video and music live in an engine shop of the Austrian Railway. (Blog details are sketchy, but see Fashionable Technology.) Now, if only they had a train controller for the performance.