This video demonstrates using Percussa AudioCubes in place of Jean Michel Jarre’s Laser Harp on Rendez-Vous II.
Here’s what they have to say about the setup:
Being a fan of Jean Michel Jarre’s music and live performances, we thought it would be a great idea to play Rendez-Vous II on AudioCubes using the Xils Synthix synthesizer. During live performances, Jean-Michel Jarre is playing Rendez-Vous II on a laser harp with 9 beams. To play a note, he’s touching one of the laser beams.
We applied a similar principle to the AudioCubes, and used the sensors of the cubes to play notes.
For the setup, we used 9 AudioCubes, because Jean-Michel Jarre’s laser harp consists of 9 beams. Each of the AudioCubes was assigned as a sensor cube in MIDIBridge, but we configured only 1 sensor per cube. We turned the cube on its side face, to make sure we could touch the sensor on the top of the cube.
via Percussa
Um…. I got to roadie a bit for Jarre’s 1986 show in Houston, Texas. That was 26 years ago. The “Laser Harp” was a Synthex preset created by synth-whiz Paul Wiffen to begin with. That was a wonderful experience, but I’d REALLY like to hear something more indicative of the AudioCube potential here. This was nice as a test run, but surely there is more to it than Jarre covers. A synthesizer of any kind has too much potential for the gold standard to merely be “vintage” sound and songs rendered with newer toys.
You can also use ILDA Award winning Laser harp controller from Prolight.
That was subtle.
I’d use these cubes for launching likeminded textures. Seems impractical to play them note for note. What do I know, though? Has anybody here tried them?
I think Mark Mosher tried 🙂