Getting people uninhibited enough to sit down and play with game controllers: easy. (Well, among geeks, anyway) Getting them to play music together: hard. So, the solution by Benjamin Gaulon, aka Recyclism: hook some NES controllers into a Mac running Max/MSP and let them play that way. Hit the project section to find videos of the results. Let me tell you, they sound . . . okay, awful. But it’s fun watching geeks jam with controller pads. (So should the Max patch automatically make it sound good — or does that kill the fun of sounding bad together? I guess the latter.)
Thanks to our friend Chris O’Shea for this one. Check out his Pixelsumo blog for more stuff like this. And the tool behind the magic, Max/MSP, got an update this week; see earlier story.
[Updated: Check out the album version (more polished than the rehearsals) for more NES controller-made music!]