The day the iPhone was announced at Macworld, some of us immediately wanted to use it as a simple multi-touch controller for music. It’s no substitute for a dedicated, large, expressive multi-touch controller like the JazzMutant Lemur. But it’s also far less expensive, useful as a phone/Internet device/media player, and could easily be a simple, multi-touch controller. Basic multi-touch gestures could be a powerful tool for controlling music. Then, the sad news came that development wasn’t going to be open. Hearts sank.

Good news: Masayuki Akamatsu, the brilliant Max/MSP developer who first bridged the popular modular audio and multimedia environment to the Wii remote (see aka.wiiremote), is on the case. It’s still early in development, and for now is an extremely simple implementation: it only routes buttons and text on a Safari webpage to a Max/MSP patch. What’s cool is that it uses the OpenSoundControl (OSC) protocol to do it (with PHP on the Web end), and it works (you can even use it now if you’ve got an iPhone):

aka.iphone Preview
Discussion on the Cycling ‘74 Forums

Let’s talk about what this is not: it’s not multi-touch.