The Pulse project was designed to engage audiences by combining musical accompaniment that directly translates motion being captured by the Kinect sensor. The entire application was developed in house and required the development of their own language (Pulse SL) in order to achieve a clean, small footprint that sends notes or controller events to music software such as Ableton Live.
In this great demonstration of using a Kinect enabled digital synthesizer, the folks at 1000 errors used a wide assortment of applications to build this very cool hack. The digital pot-o-gumbo consists of several applications being used in tandem such as Synapse Kinect, Maxxforlive, Ableton Live, VDMX and Quartz Composer
Synapse is an app for Mac and Windows that allows you to easily use your Kinect to control Ableton Live, Quartz Composer, Max/MSP/Jitter, and any other application that can receive OSC events. It sends joint positions and hit events via OSC, and also sends the depth image into Quartz Composer. In a way, this allows you to use your whole body as an instrument.