Sound museum.

[Kitsune]

Wow! Its been a banner year for synesthaesia lately, with Lumines and Meteos debuting and now Toshio Iwai, long-time sound-based artist is debuting his new project on the DS.

http://electroplankton.com/

Just in case your brain isn't working correctly click on the spot and then the bubbles to get all the content. You don't really have to translate the words to know what's going on unless you don't realize in that one video than Emiko's name is being reversed to Okime.

Reminds me of Depth, on the PlayStation nine years ago, where you'd steer a dolphin around different soundscape, collect musical phrases, remix the phrases and then re-steer and re-mix and endlessly tweak and re-create musical instruments. If you got the hang of it, it turned out to be more than a musical curiousity as the amount of stuff you could do would last you week at least a solid week or two. I still come back to that game even today.

It would be nice to have new Depth, but one wonders how far it goes.

If you're ever in Tokyo, you can usually check out Toshio Iwai's work there.

-Kitsune

[simoniker]

Iwai is probably best known in the West for Sim Tunes, by the way, which is awfully fun to play around with, even if it does have horrible-sounding MIDI-ish musical instruments in it and is theoretically for kiddies. Interestingly, this link:

http://pbl.cc.gatech.edu/games/16

..claims: 'Iwai first wrote Sim Tunes for Nintendo, who later chickened out of publishing something so radical. Luckily, a group of programmers from Maxis saw Iwai's permanent installation of the program at San Francisco's Exploratorium museum, and managed to track Iwai down and strike a deal to publish it.' If true, it's cool that Nintendo should return to Iwai for extreme surreal musical craziness, ten years later.

Oh, and Kitsune, it hasn't been enough of a banner year for synesthaesia if Jeff Minter has had a project cancelled recently, *sigh*. But some Mizuguchi and Iwai goodness never hurt anybody, right?

[Dave Long]

It looks fantastic. The videos do a pretty good job of showing you what you can do with it. Perrin Kaplan even mentioned it in an IGN interview apparently so there's a very real possibility we'll get it here in the US!

--Dave

[OrfBC]

This kind of thing is cool, and so is Warioware and Feel the Magic, etc., but I hope the DS gets some real games soon.