I am back in the sunshine of Topanga, having returned from FITC Amsterdam, and it was, as usual, a really great time.

While in Amsterdam, I debuted Synthia, the first publicly usable musical instrument to emerge from Project Ludi at Almer/Blank Labs.

Synthia on the web, is a Flash 10 application that translates pictures into music -- infinite classical canons -- using a small set of rules that establish key, restricted notes within the key, tempo, instrumentation and the score.

I actually developed Synthia as a demonstration app to accompany my talk, 'Hearing Pictures' (which went really well at FITC Amsterdam, and which you can see at FITC Toronto in April), but the results were so fun to play with, that we decided to make it a publicly usable web-application, where anyone can upload any picture, have Synthia turn it into music, and then share it with your friends and embed it in any web page.

We will be posting a lot more about Synthia in the coming weeks, and updating her rules and features over the coming months. But, for now, I'd encourage all of you to play around with the Synthia Composer (just upload an image and listen), or just browse the gallery to hear what other pictures sound like.

And, if while playing with Synthia, you have some ideas on how we might commercialize her, share your thoughts and ideas for a chance to win an iPad.

Share and enjoy!

-r