This is the famous Arduino. If you haven’t heard of this wonderful machine yet I would highly suggest doing some research on the topic, or at the very least heading over to their site at http://arduino.cc/

Here I have started to wire the pieces of a simple chord-synthesizer together. This project was coupled with Max/MSP and used several buttons and a slider to play the root, third and fifth of a given note at the users discretion.

I purchased a starter pack from sparkfun.com which gives you access to a small sample of sensors, wires, resistors and of course the microcontroller. The learning curve isn’t very steep and the possibilities are only limited by your budget and imagination. Pretty neat stuff.