Wii Music is apparently going to feature a drum section. Hope Nintendo implements support for the balance board, so that you had the following configuration: remotes as drumsticks and balance board as bass drum. The Wii Drums section includes splitscreen multiplayer, that’s great, of course, two balance boards is a bit much, but it would of course be enough with only one, since it’s wide enough for two people to share and hit “two individual” bass drums at once.

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I had one idea a while back ago about devoting an area in Wii Music to a completely new musical instrument–or vr instrument–and in short, it’s just using the motion sensing device to allow the user to make different tunes depending on where in space s/he is holding the remote, and adding to this configuration the usage of the buttons on the remote; and of course things such as that there would need to be a “physical representation” of the instrument on the screen, since it’s fun to watch a strange, new instrument go about on the tv (although I would very much like it to look like an old brass instrument but in a new shape), a tv representation also opens up to interactivity between the instrument and the virtual area it’s in. On a basic level that could mean adding mini-games such as “obstacle courses” where you had things such as water in parts of the area that distorted the sound, although “mini-game” isn’t maybe the right labelling of such a distraction; on a higher level it could be placing patterns on the screen that guided the user as to where s/he was on a tonal range (such as having a big cake with slices that represented different tones).

It’s very interesting, because you have a lot of different input possibilities with something like the remote, not only is it the remotes placement in space, but also at what axis–as in, whether or not it’s being tilted or not–and that results in a lot of different ways to manipulate sound. But if you were to implement a tilt function as well, you would really have to go low-key with that, as in not being to extreme with the sensitivity. If I’ve understood everything right, the karts in Mario Kart Wii wont move at slightest tilt with the controller, and I’m suggesting something similar with the tilt movement sensitivity for this vr instrument.

So in what way would all these parameters then affect the sound that emits from this kind of strange “instrument”? Well, the best thing would of course be if the user could determine that on his/her own; but if you were to have a standard configuration then maybe the tilting could be ascribed to the bending of the tone. I guess that would feel most natural, since it would feel more logical if big movements with the remote resulted in changes on a wider tonal range whereas just tilting the remote only resulted in bending the current tone you played.

Suffice is to say though that the possibilities are endless for such an area / vr instrument :)

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Following in the same line, another similar vr instrument could be one where instead the tv screen represented the instrument, and the remote were a mere tool to manipulate the sound… Ok, so maybe, the difference between the two “instruments”, or areas, wouldn’t be that profound. Both would manipulate sound using the remote, and both would use the virtual area (what you see on the tv) as a place where the user could orient himself/herself in. The only difference between the two areas is that, in this area there would be a large frame that encompassed a lot of smaller frames, or squares, every square housed a different sound and the user could manipulate that sound by placing the vr representation of the remote (or icon) inside said square and move it further in and further out. Of course, the result would be very psychedelic melodies, as the user went in and out of the square and the tone never stopped, so to see to it that that never occurred, you’d have to press a button on the remote whenever you wanted to take a tune, because as the old asian saying about music goes: music is the silent spaces in between tones. Or I think that’s how the saying goes at least :P

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As for the orchestra section, let’s hope that there in the final product will be a possibility to not only affect the tempo with your “remote conducting”, but dynamics as well. Here’s hoping, but it could maybe prove a bit too difficult to implement.