John,
Awesome, thank you for the information. It's a bit difficult for those of us out here in the real world to imagine how things will all fit together, but I'm starting to get a better picture. More information is definitely welcome and useful. I would like more information now even if I will lose the ability to run existing scripts later... I will just rewrite the scripts later, and I'm sure having the extra time to soak in the information about how the system is architected will be beneficial.
It does sound like talkers are what I want. It definitely makes more sense to evaluate the scripts ahead of time to achieve the low latency on execution, and this is exactly what would be needed for live usage.
I think I can actually execute part of my vision right now using the existing ability to switch scales over MIDI. I'm going to load a set of custom scales, each containing the notes of a particular chord in a chord progression, and sequence the MIDI to switch between them over time. Then, I can just jam on the instrument -- even just randomly mash keys -- and the song will still follow the same progression. I'm sure once I experiment with this a little bit I will get more ideas of things like this to do. Experimentation is why I bought the eigenharp after all :-) Eventually it would be nice if EigenD had it's own high resolution DAW which allowed you to sequence these sorts of things, but building a DAW is hard work, so it's important to build bridges to existing systems with MIDI and OSC.
Regarding controlling things by playing notes being easy to learn -- I'm eager to learn, and I'm quite sure it will be easy with a little practice. Just need more information -- right now we're all mostly staring into an opaque box.
I actually created a 10 key chording keyboard, using chords of my own design, and it has been surprisingly easy to learn as well. You can type almost any key on a regular computer keyboard using various chords of 6 keys. The other 4 keys are shift, control, option, and command. It also uses three of the keys up top as a mouse. One key allows you to move the mouse, one key allows you to scroll the scroll wheel (up and down as well as left and right), and one key is for clicking.
I'll make a video demoing this tomorrow, and if people are interested I can bundle up the max patch for it, which anyone should be able to run in the free max runtime. The only issue is that you also have to own the Plogue Bidule audio unit for the mouse, to get the roll and yaw info into Max over OSC, and OSCulator if you want the scroll wheel support, since the aka.mouse external for max doesn't support the scroll wheel. But it's just a prototype, and one that works extremely well.
The thing I like best about the eigenharp and the monome is the community of imaginative users who see no walls with these new interfaces. If you can imagine it, you should build it, and if it doesn't turn out to be a great idea, you learned something. The sharing of techniques also sets up a powerful network effect of people encouraging each other.
UK
