MIDI Bleep Blop — perform on live synths from a Spectacles lens

We dropped MIDI Bleep Blop on r/Spectacles as a #Lensfest May 2026 OSS submission — a MIDI library and bridge so you can perform on live musical instruments, with a Tester Lens you can try yourself.

It’s a MIDI library that lets you generate MIDI notes from different platforms — including a Snap Spectacles ‘24 lens — and play them on real synths. MIT-licensed, written in TypeScript. There’s a demo video of a live performance: notes triggered from the glasses, played out through hardware.

How it works

Spectacles can’t speak MIDI to your synth directly, so MIDI Bleep Blop routes the data off-device. A lens generates the note and control-change events, ships them over a WebSocket bridge to a companion process on your computer, and that process hands them to the OS MIDI subsystem — CoreMIDI on macOS, ALSA on Linux, or WinMM on Windows. From there it’s just MIDI: any synth, soft or hard, picks it up.

What it ships

• Pure-TS MIDI library — note and control-change helpers with state tracking, no native dependencies.
• WebSocket transports for both Node and Lens Studio.
• Device catalogs for hardware synths, starting with the KORG Volca line (catalog data under CC-BY-SA-4.0).
• Groove generators — built-in acid, house, and trance patterns.
• Lens Studio components — a piano keyboard and CC parameter controls, plus per-channel output routing.
• A Tester Lens — so you can try the whole chain on your own Spectacles before touching the code.

Why

Spatial computing keeps looking for inputs that aren’t just taps and gaze. Music performance is a natural fit — your hands are free, the surface is infinite, and the latency budget for triggering a synth survives a WebSocket hop. MIDI Bleep Blop is the reference plumbing for anyone who wants to turn a Spectacles lens into an instrument.

Release thread on r/Spectacles · source on github.com/IoTone.