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Tenori-on marries light and sound to great musical effect.

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Yamaha's new Tenori-on was developed in tandem with design graduate Toshio Iwai. As you can probably tell from the photos, this isn't your common or garden piece of kit, so what exactly is it all about?

Let's deal with the physical unit itself first, as it's a stunner. A grey outer metal 'ring' encloses a 16 x 16 grid of LEDs, which look almost as if they might be made from Space Lego.

The moment you power the Tenori-on up, each of these grid locations become both a light and a note, as we'll discuss in a moment. The grey outer housing contains five buttons on both left and right sides, with a pair of basic stereo speakers included across the top panel and an SD card slot embedded along the back edge.

Along the bottom you'll find the LCD (which keeps you in touch with parameters) and a mini-jack headphone output. A bespoke MIDI 'Din' socket connects to a MIDI 'Y cable', which is included in the box, enabling you to sync two Tenori-ons together via the MIDI In, or use sequences as MIDI triggers for other equipment via the Out.

Musically, you can primarily think of the Tenori-on as a pattern sequencer-plus-synth. Its most immediate function is to enable you to create a pattern of notes by directly pressing the buttons on its top panel. A 16-step sequence loops round from the left-hand side to the right, and every time the sequencer passes through a lit note, it sounds.

You can create chords by highlighting two notes in the same vertical row, or remove them by pressing a highlighted note a second time. If you decide to remove a pattern completely, a simple press of the Clear button at the top wipes the slate clean.

Modes

Tenori-on's operating system is built around six separate modes, all of which handle note input or pattern creation. The most immediate is Score mode, which we've already explained above - the pattern moves from left to right either across the full 16 steps, or fewer if you choose to limit the step range.

Random mode is next. Highlighting a single note here causes that note to repeat but as soon as you enter a second note, the LED lights travel from one note to the next, only producing pitch when the light arrives at the highlighted note. Entering a third means the light travels from note one to two to three and so on, so depending on the distance between notes, a loop of unusual length begins to build.

You can rotate the random shape you've created around its axis by pressing function button [L4] while drawing a curve with your finger on the matrix. Bounce mode arranges notes on Tenori-on's matrix as a virtual piano, with low notes to the left and high ones to the right.

Highlighting an LED causes those in the column below it to bounce from whichever 'height' you've selected to the bottom row and back again. Every time the LED hits the bottom row, the note plays. You can pick a height for every column, so you soon end up with a kind of virtual musical ping pong match as different notes bounce off the bottom row.