Processing Community Day NYC 2026 • MIDI Workshop Preview

I'll be leading a workshop at Processing Community Day 2026 here in New York! Tickets are free and the event will be happening on October 3rd at NYU ITP in downtown Brooklyn.

The workshop adapts some previous workshops, ideas and experiments I've accrued over the years giving my talks largely on creating interactive experiences with JavaScript and WebMIDI.

Adapting and elaborating on them for Processing was an exciting opportunity. It was also a lot of fun to spend a couple evenings playing with more ideas that have been percolating in my head for a few years now.

If you're in the New York area, I highly encourage you to attend! It will be a fun event and there will be lots of great speakers and exhibitors at PCD as well.

To whet your appetite, I recorded a few videos showcasing some of the ideas I plan of bringing to the workshop to talk about and inspire with.

MIDI Chess

Long ago, I adapted Go for the Novationa Launchapd. At 8x8 it was just a cute demo and always felt a little too small to play real Go, but it's the perfect size for chess!

Lo and behold, a game of chess played with on a MIDI controller. The overlay in the video is on a web page and the board is drawn with Processing. You can even click and drag to move the pieces on the screen if you prefer and see them reflected on the device!

The color-coded pieces were the funniest part to me. You can customize them to your hearts content in the web interface, though I settled on a default of each side getting a primary color plus its compliment and each differently valued piece on the board is a slightly different shade or tint of one of those two colors. It's still very hard to discern what piece you're actually selecting when it's your turn, but the green preview that shows "legal" moves for that pieces helps tremendously.

MIDI Fighter Interactive Visuals

The MIDI Fighter is a delightfully straight-forward controller that has all the right ingredients to make for fun interface for this workshop.

A short-but-sweet collection of interactive visuals controlled by a MIDI Fighter controller. I've procured a small handful of these for the demo, with the intent to lend them out to folks on the day of the event. Each bank select a different visualization type and buttons interact with it accordingly.

MIDI Painting with PipSqueak

I partnered with a local MIDI maker at useMIDI to procure some of these PipSqueak devices for the workshop as well. It's a very expressive controller with 360 degrees of motion and a push button.

Here's a fun demo simply using them to "paint" on the screen in a visually interesting way, where the brush always snaps back to the center.

Pressing the button splits the drawing pane in half (i.e. doubling every click, up to a point until it resets) with each brush in the center of that pane, but mirroring the directionality of of the pane it's copied from.

I feel like I explained that poorly, but the effect is a sort of interactive kaleidoscope painting thingamajig.

MIDI Fireworks

I touched on this idea in the previous MIDI Fighter demo, but it was so cute and fun and I thought it would be fun to make a slightly more elaborate version that just focused on fireworks.

Each bank choose different firework styles and the remaining 3x4 button grid below maps to spots on the screen the fireworks will target.

Cute, fun, lots of opportunities to expand.

MIDI Marquee

Let's make <maruqee> elements like it's 1999.

Pretty simple, but still fun demo built on the Novation Launchpad. The device actually facilitates this really easily out of the box with SysEx message, but only in one color. This demo lets you choose different colors and direction and even has a goofy "export as HTML" feature if you want a matching <marquee> to embed somewhere.

The Game of Life (MIDI Ediiton)

Sometimes life is exciting. Sometimes is boring. And now, sometimes, it is controlled via MIDI.

An interactive version of Conway's Game of Life where you can seed the grid in real time. Kind of fun if you skip toward the end where I press different buttons simultaneously to "lock-in" particular shapes.

The Great MIDI Treasure Hunt

I have saved the most elaborate and perhaps high-concept for last.

Inspired by Zelda, our noble adventure traverses a maze of rooms each displayed on an 8x8 grid—both in the web interface and visually on the board.

Our adventurer cannot solve the puzzles alone however! They will need the assistance of a benevolent, unseen force to help them move forward. The adventurer is controlled via keyboard and intended to be played looking a the screen. The part of the "unseen force" is played on the physical device where the game state is relayed (sometimes with extra hints and information not visible to the adventurer).

The unseen force gets to do things like knock down loose walls, providing planks to traverse water, light torches in dark rooms and press or hold switches in sequence to help the adventurer progress.

If you made it this far and live in New York, go grab a ticket and come join us at Processing Community Day 2026 on October 3rd!

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Published on Saturday, September 19th 2026. Read this post as plain-text.