On Create Digital Music, amidst lots of hacks for listening and creation at the Music Hack Day here in New York, two teams focused on Kinect. Those creative instruments easily stole the show from more conventional social music tools. At top, Stringer, a simulated instrument that uses Kinect for input; at bottom, Bionic DJ, a DJ hack.

At Music Hack Day, Amidst Listening Interfaces, Novel Performance Control a Winner

Interested in trying Kinect yourself? In comments on that story, we get a tip from Tohm Judson.

FYI… for the beginning Kinect hackers and non programmers like me out there, I have put together a tutorial/walkthrough to get the OpenNi packages working on mac.
http://tohmjudson.com/?p=30
At the end you should be able to send OSC data wherever you like via OSCeleton.
Max Discussion here:
http://cycling74.com/forums/topic.php?id=30593

Hmmmm… sounds like we need a general getting started guide for Mac, Windows, and Linux, OpenFrameworks and Processing and Cinder, covering just the basics. (“Hello, World Kinect”?) Got some tips? Let us know.

In the meantime, Tohm’s starter guide is a great place to start, and there’s some useful commentary below. (Linux users I think will actually have an easier time as they’re familiar with some of this stuff – got to master those open source tools, Mac users, and harness the UNIX within!)