You wouldn’t need to be "into" Max programming to take a look at the jit.3m object and to combine it with some easy-peasy scale object action hooked to a midiout object at all – and that’s just for starters. Do you care enough about doing what you describe to learn enough Max to do *that?* As with adding any new thing to your repertoire, ideas are easy – the real Zen of the thing is whether your desire is sufficient to send you on the journey.

This sounds like an absolutely magnificent way to start, to me (and you can check out some help files for jit.3m and the scale object to get you started. One object gives you data about an image, the other one lets you scale and modify the input and output ranges of data. Beyond that, it’s just knowing what MIDI stuff you want to send data to). Your mileage may vary, of course. :-)