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Conduct Your Own Dubstep "Womps" With Synapse For Kinect

The future just got a little closer—this mother-of-all-Kinect-music-hacks has the potential to inject some serious creative force into Kinect as a performance tool.

Imagine using your arms and body movements to compose ground-shaking dubstep beats onstage, or playing air guitar in your living room to shred solos on your television.

The future just got a little closer thanks to Ryan Challinor, a user interface programmer at Harmonix (the company behind innovative music gaming titles Rock Band and Dance Central for Kinect). He’s just released the first iteration of Synapse for Kinect. This mother-of-all-Kinect-music-hacks directly connects music sequencers to the Kinect, lowering the bar for technical expertise and fostering the birth of an open-source community for musicians and tech designers that has the potential to inject serious creative force into Kinect as a performance tool.

Synapse is a free open-source program for Windows and Mac that connects the Kinect peripheral to music composition applications Ableton Live and Quartz Composer, allowing users to program custom manipulations of music and visuals. Or, as Ryan describes: "more directly, it allows you to do things like play with a dubstep theremin while you have fire shooting out of your hands," as seen in one demo of the Synapse application above.

Ryan continues to update his Synapse for Kinect Tumblr with creations and videos made with Synapse—hopefully some of these innovative programs will show up on Kinect Fun Labs one day.