Yamaha Unveils New Tenori-On Orange Musical Inspiration Device

I have seen some strange musical gadgets before, but the Tenori-On from Yamaha is one of the strangest. We first spied the original gadget way back in 2007 when it debuted. The original device is far from cheap at a street price of $999. Yamaha has unveiled a new, cheaper version called the Tenori-On O with a street price of $699.99.

If you are wondering exactly what the Tenor-On is it's some sort of light sequencer that takes music and adds a visual representation to it. The difference between the new version and the old version is that the new Tenori device lacks the original's battery power capability and the 256 orange LEDs can only be seen from one side whereas the original is dual sided.

The new device has an 8 x 8 inch square board with a matrix of orange LEDs measuring 16 vertical and 16 horizontal rows of LED buttons. The buttons blink on and off to provide visual structure for the music. The buttons can be touched to create music using the device without any special training. The buttons are designed to be pressed with the thumbs.