My SparkFun components arrived… taking 9 days from order in the US… but since I thought I’d build Dave Mee an Auduino as a thank you for lending me his Arduino kit I bought some additional 4.7k linear rotary pots, knobs and an audio jack socket from Maplin for an equitable £9.95 in the interim. They’re chunkier – but chassis fitting.
So I had a good day at Fablab Manchester on Friday…
(more…)
I’m currently researching how to make and control sound with an Arduino as well as sourcing possible components for the mooted Monomatic Modular Music Box for the “Analogue is the new Digital” exhibition as part of AND Festival in October.
With a total budget of £400 solutions and parts need to be cheap & cheerful – yet do the job…
I’ve been following Hans Kuder’s flexible, nodal music sequencer Tiction for a while – and while there’s not been much development recently – I think it has plenty of unrealised potential. So much so that I’ve been thinking about how to develop an original application – one inspired by Tiction – but that realises the multi-touch capabilities of the iPad.
There are other emerging nodal sequencing applications – most notably:
It’s been a while since I’ve spent a bit of time browsing and catching up with developments at the monome.org community site – though I’m always interested to see what’s been going on – and typically a few things caught my eye:
MonoControl – “an adaptable and flexible midi control application written in Processing for Ableton Live (or any other DAW) which, if configured correctly, should report all controller changes to MonoControl which then adjusts the LEDs on the monome. The app uses the buttons of the far rhs column of the monome to navigate through 8 different pages – and in each you can create combinations of faders, crossfader, x-y faders, push, toggle and note buttons and button matrixes – all stored in an an xml file.” (my somewhat edited version of the app description)…
This is exactly what I’ve been hoping to develop myself using Nick Rothwell’s shado…so I started to implement it into my Mirror2 real-time video processing Processing sketch and it’s working well…
| As part of the recent Cybersonica 09 Road Trip I was in Liverpool for Interface Amnesty organised by SoundNetwork.
“Inspired by a trade fair scene in the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film “The Conversation”, jumble sales and the excellent Make magazine maker faires, Interface Amnesty plays with the conventions of interface design, music technology products and the presentation of interactive art.“ |
…as well as Nick Rothwell’s shado, SevenUpLive…
My functionality developments for the Mirror2 patch by Daniel Shiffman.
Processing
As with my previous experiments with Flash I think that selecting Processing found and library examples I like and then extending their functionality will be a good way to develop my coding skills…
on Friday, 13th February I attended the Owl Project m-Log workshop at FACT in Liverpool and spent a thoroughly enjoyable (though quite intense and tiring day) building my own m-Log from the supplied kit.
the m-Log kit
With my monome 64 due to arrive imminently I’ve been browsing the monome website for sparkly things I particularly like the look of…
Starting with Ableton Live…
1. drumwreck by anton hornquist – website & youtube demo
monome step sequencer in maxmsp/live
Early days for this app… which seems both intuitive and ergonomic… and even works using the ‘monome40_fake’ patch. Latest developments on its monome discussion thread.
Here’s a first draft outline as PDF - though it’s still waiting for feedback and contributions from Anthony Rowe.
There’s always more to find out there… Deep Vacuuming the Source Files and then looking fairly systematically through BIT-101 Lab has turned up several interesting Flash demos:
a sweet little non-interactive 3d particle system waveform – 041101_lewis.fla
Click on the image to load Flash in a pop up.
and a simple sound activated wave pattern – 050819_lewis.fla
Click on the image to load Flash in a pop up.
It also suggested some new and useful practitioner and reference links – though these have quickly branched out further still…
A collaboration with Anthony Rowe of squidsoup – an ideal partner for this project – squidsoup’s work being focussed as it is on exploring minimalist, interactive, virtual visual and aural environments.
What are we trying to achieve?
Ultimately the aim would be to create a beautiful and musically responsive visualisation device and/or piece of programming that could be used by both TSP and squidsoup for live gigs and/or exhibitions.
