The main idea behind this project was to create something more fun for kids and even adults to replace the utterly boring Penny Arcade at TD Bank branches. We would create parts that the users could move around on the table and the virtual coins falling from the top would bounce off the parts. The users would try to direct the coins into corresponding buckets.
We decided that we’d do contour tracing to get the shape of the parts and then turn those points into Box2D objects.
We used a Kinect to make it a bit easier to differentiate between the objects and the table. This turned out to be a bit of a problem during setup because if the Kinect wasn’t level, there were problems grabbing the right depth. Also aligning the projector image with the Kinect image was a lot more difficult than we anticipated.
And this is where we wound up by the end.
Published in categories: ITP, Spatial Media, Spring 2011
For Bindu Shards, audio and light needed to be synchronized in order to create a fully engaging and immersive piece. The sound design was done working with Alexandra Kuechenberg. Coming out of the concept of Binaural Beats, the sound was created to bring the user into a meditative state by stimulating brain waves.
The relation of exterior light to interior light is explored further in the work Bindu Shards (2010), a fully immersive visual and auditory work to be experienced by one person at a time. Read more
Published in categories: Featured
An array of pylons sits untouched, waiting for someone to discover it’s true nature. Based in proximity, dissonance and curiosity, Dissonics reacts to entities unknown to it through sonic force and light.
Dissonics is a new instrument I created in order to push the use of tension both physically and sonically. I used Arduino and custom built hardware along with Parallax PING ultrasonic range finders to interface with custom and off the shelf software. The data from the range finders was sent to custom made Max/MSP software in order to interpret the data to midi messages and pass that on to software synthesizers. Musically speaking, Dissonics creates music initially in a major scale, giving the audience a fairly pleasant experience. As the performer comes closer to the pylons, the notes being played travel to more and more dissonant places, through a minor, augmented, diminished and finally twelve tone scale. The interaction truly gives the performer a sense of power over the sound, a sort of sonic conjuring. Certain objects that are part of the instrument drastically change the timbre and quality of the sound to truly give it more than just dissonance as part of it’s dynamics.
Published in categories: Fall 2010, Featured
The idea started with taking a place that I find to be a sort of personal hell…a boring office desk and making it worse by making everything useless. It turned out, I made the office a lot more fun than I wanted to. The music is Colour Eye by Jon Hopkins.
After a year of working on and off on a purely generative music visualizer, I wanted to attempt a pre-rendered visualization. We Have You Now was a first real foray into animation with After Effects.
Published in categories: Fall 2010, Featured, Frame by Frame
Always having been a music fan, when I came upon Processing, I started playing with audio-generative visuals. While I prefer working with generative visuals, I’ve always been impressed by pre-rendered visuals.
I’d like to use one of two songs by electronic musician, Jon Hopkins. Either Colour Eye: http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/s/Colour+Eye/1XkofR or Wire: http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/s/Wire/2pOrsb
What I’d like to do is take something from nature and have it become geometry as the song progresses. Needs more flushing out, but it’s a start.
Published in categories: Fall 2010, Frame by Frame
This past week David Phillips, Michelle Temple and I worked on the drainage and overflow part of our project. Our initial concern was that since we needed overflow from the top box down through three others, if we used a standard half inch tube for draining, the water would flow out of the first box before it would ever overflow into the next. We did some testing.
We set up two of our containers with just basic drains.
We filled up the box with hydroton, then filled the box with water from a gallon jug. Surprisingly, it fit almost exactly a gallon of water with the hydroton pellets. So there we are; each container holds a gallon of water with the hydroton. Four gallons of water minimum needed. So most likely, we’ll go with a five or six gallon basin for the total water storage.
From here we planned on setting up the complete drainage system for at least two boxes. This is where we assumed we bought everything we needed, but we did not. We were missing compression drippers. What a dripper does, is it only allows a small amount of water through per hour. By using drippers for our drainage, it keeps the water from completely flooding out faster than we would like.
So we headed back to our favorite hydroponics store, Brooklyn Hydro & Garden and learned a few things about ebb & flow systems. Initially we assumed that the smaller the dripper the better, so we figured we’d get 1/2 gallon per hour compression drippers. After having talked with a very knowledgable employee and doing a little math, we realized that a half gallon per hour would make each container take two hours to drain out completely, which is not good for the plants. Instead we opted for 2 GPH drippers, which would give us a 30 minute drain period for the system. And off we went, back to work.
We put together two of the drainage systems, tested for water leakage, which there was none and then we wanted to tackle the overflow from one container to the next. We just kind of guessed at this point. We drilled two holes into the side of one of the containers and placed 1/4″ tubing into each hole to drain out to the next container. To really test it out, we held one above the other, put both drain tubes into a bucket. That bucket also contained a few gallons of water and the submersible pump. We switched on the pump and let the water fill up the container. Once the water got to the 1/4″ tubes for overflow, there was no leaking and the water flowed through nicely. The only issue was that the water wasn’t overflowing into the tubes fast enough. The container was filling the water up faster than it was able to drain out to the next container. Our thinking is to add another tube or two for overflow on our next test.
Published in categories: Designing Living Systems, Fall 2010
Taking Steve Reich’s phase music as an inspiration, I created Playing the Book, an experiment in doing the same for video.
Published in categories: Fall 2010, Frame by Frame
Currently, I have the basic interaction of my instrument as the tense pushing and pulling to and from a vertical plane. What exactly the vertical plane is, is unknown. One thing I’m looking into is ways of interaction to lock sensor values in place in order to be able to do more with other parts of the instrument. I’m using a synthesizer pad sound as well as minimal drum beats. The interaction as of right now increases volume, adjust filter cutoff and resonance. There is a point in the interaction, more a part of this specific performance, where distortion and delay are added based on the distance from the plane. What’s left in terms of interaction is a way to make the interaction in general more interesting as well as figuring out a way to handle the drum beats. As far as the object itself, I’m still trying to figure that out. I think once I figure out the interaction and the sound is solid, the object can come naturally. One other thing I’d like to do is reduce the amount of software I’m using. Currently I’m using Ableton Live as a host, MAX handling the serial to MIDI data, Reason for the synth and Reaktor for the drums. That’s just too much that could go wrong.
Published in categories: Fall 2010, NIME
Steve Reich recently became a very interesting figure in my musical world. As a drummer, phase music is probably one of the hardest things to get my head around.
This is a piece of his called Clapping Music
Inspired by this, I want to try and create “phase video.” I’m not sure exactly where I want to go with it yet, but I was looking at time displacement as an effect. The question is, what’s my content. Do I go with musicians performing? Perhaps just street footage? This I have to figure out.
I made an example using an old video assignment I had.
Here’s the original video:
and here’s the new version:
Published in categories: Fall 2010, Frame by Frame
This is a critique of an Instructable on how to make an Altoids Speaker. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-an-Altoids-speaker/
Published in categories: Designing for Greenfab, Fall 2010
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