Ever since I discovered that I enjoyed programming as much as synthesizers, I've been looking for ways to combine the two.

To this end, I was planning on buying a Chameleon several years ago, but it had two big strikes against it: it cost a fortune, and had a really low-level Motorola DSP-based programming interface that didn't run on OS X (boo). Plus, I think they stopped making them.

Anyway, I just came across the monome while trolling the Virus forums. The monome is still somewhat overpriced but has a variety of pretty flexible programming options, including a few scripting languages that look dead simple to pick up. Plus, there are a bunch of apps out there for the monome already, so even if I can't be bothered to learn how to program it I can have it make noises and flash lights at me. :)

Check out some videos of the monome in action. Most of these are using the mlr application for sample looping.