Eigenharpist Geert Bevin has found a new use for his Eigenlabs Eigenharp – as a game controller. It may be extreme overkill, but that has never been a problem for us at Synthtopia.

Here’s what Bevin has to say about using the Eigenharp as a game controller:

We’ve seen many novel uses of game controllers for making music, when I resumed PC/Mac gaming a few weeks ago I went the opposite route since I couldn’t find a game controller that was sensitive enough, had plenty of keys, didn’t put strain on my wrists and had extremely low latency. I tried many alternatives like the PS3 Dualshock, the SpaceNavigator 3D mouse, the Alphagrip iGrip keyboard, iPad gestures, … and a Logitech G13 keypad with a Logitech G600 MMO gaming mouse was the only thing that felt usable, but still not perfect.

Since I had these awesomely sensitive Eigenharp instruments, it suddenly made sense that they would work just as well for gaming as for music. I thus created an EigenD extension agent that allows the mapping of any Eigenharp key to any keyboard key, as well as mouse movements and mouse button clicks.

As you can see in this video, the Eigenharp is indeed a wonderful game controller. While I don’t expect people to buy the Eigenharp just for that, existing Eigenharpers now have one of the best game controllers available, all the time while training muscle memory for their musical instrument.

All of this can of course be further configured with different thresholds, sensitivity settings, multi-axis velocity-based triggering and much more. Currently this agent is only available for MacOSX, but it shouldn’t be hard to add Windows support.

Detailed mapping and additional information can be found at Eigenzone. The source code is available on GitHub.