Sunday 21 September 2008
We are engaged; handmade is the way to my heart
Above: the ring, made by Sean, my sweetheart of nine years and given to me one week ago, on the beach at Ashbridges Bay, at midnight, while the remnants of Hurricane Ike whipped by.
The awesome Michele, who counts metalworking among her many talents, had invited him by her studio to learn some of the craft and create a piece of jewellery that day. Acting on a deep impulse he decided to make this for me - knowing that even though I never wear jewellery, I’m a big DIY nerd, and if there was one thing I’d never want to take off, it would be something made by his own hands. He made me a freaking ring. For about three days I couldn’t look down at it without starting to cry again.
It was pitch black. We had to use the light from my cel phone to see it. We sat with the hot winds buffeting us, eating pretzels and watching birds fly backwards. And then we got caught in a sudden downpour as we pedalled up Woodbine*, and ate terrible breakfast sandwiches Brekwiches at an all-night coffee shop. I spent equal time crying and laughing my head off.
The long and the short of it: we are engaged. Life just got a bit stranger and much more wonderful.
* Oh, did I mention? We got bikes a few weeks ago. It’s been great, and the wounds from our respective first accidents are almost healed!
Wednesday 27 August 2008
Arduino projects: a noisemaker and an analog-to-MIDI interface
I’m finally back to working on some electronic projects. First up, the Express, an analog-to-MIDI converter built around a Bare Bones Board, an inexpensive Arduino clone.
I’ve been making up some patches for my Evolver synth to use it as an effect on guitar or bass, and thought it’d be nice to have some sort of pedal to control it, along the lines of a wah or volume pedal. The desktop model of the Evolver lacks a pedal input, hence the Express (for “expression”, both of the musical and genetic kind - evolution, geddit?). Currently, it reads one analog pin and spits out continuous controller data. Nothing particularly spectacular there, but it did fit wonderfully into the sturdy steel case from a computer keyboard A/B switchbox. There’s room for lots more inputs, and eventually I figure it’ll sport an additional analog in and some footswitch inputs which will send things like note on/off messages.
I’m still new to making enclosures, and to working metal in particular - instead of grinding out a hole that was slightly too narrow, I used a drill, which grabbed hold of the edges and warped the heck out of the front panel. Panic set in for a moment, but I managed to bash the thing back into shape using a busted old hard drive(!) as an anvil.
Word to the wise: there are two incompatible standards for the wiring of expression pedals:
1/4” - tip to wiper / ring to +5V / sleeve to ground: Clavia, CME, Electrix, Emu, Kurzweil, Oberheim, Roland/Boss
1/4” - ring to wiper / tip to +5V / sleeve to ground: Kawai, Korg, Yamaha
The former arrangement allows you to use a standard normalling jack to connect the tip to ground by default, so the input doesn’t float if nothing’s plugged in. I’m using a Boss pedal now, but my other pedal is a Yamaha, so if I want to use it as a second input, I’ll have to wire up something to cross those connections.
Being easily distractible by possibilities - giant trackball! LED matrix! stepper motor-controlled time-lapse photography! - I’m desperately trying to focus on a couple of projects at a time. Arduino project number two at present is using it for ultra-cheap and dirty sound generation, with piezo disc speakers plugged directly into the digital outputs. A little hacked-together code, and voilà:
The Bee (MP3, 640k)
I call it the Bee, though “Mosquito” might have been more appropriate. Modulating the pulse width creates some nice motion, but there’s a lot more to do, like getting R/C filters to tame some of the harshness - it really is annoying after a while. Oh yes, and putting a switch on it to shut it up between tests. And, of course, buttons and knobs to play it with… maybe even some sort of acoustic treatment, like a resonating soundbox or a spring reverb.
Thursday 5 June 2008
Notes from the Open Everything unconference, and a proposal: the Really Open Stage
Lots of good conversations at Open Everything today. The Toronto event took place today at the Centre for Social Innovation, a community space and incubator for social entrepreneurs, and further events around the world are scheduled for the rest of this year.
It’s all about the concept of “openness” - as in open source software, as in open models of government (check out Melbourne’s city planning wiki), as in the growing movement for open science.
Among other things:
- Dr Sara Scharf spoke about modern nomenclature in biology (you know - kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) and how it came about through a process akin to open source today. I want to find out more about these parallel, failed attempts that tried to create unique names by encoding all distinguishing features of a species in the name itself, but I haven’t found anything online yet.
- Marsha Cummings is working on a documentary about Station 20 West, a community health and social services centre in Saskatoon, which includes a co-op grocery store in a neighbourhood where the last commercial grocery stores have pulled out.
- Jane Farrow spoke about Jane’s Walk, a day of self-organized neighbourhood walking tours in honour of the late Jane Jacobs. Held in May, the event has spread to other cities across Canada, and is starting to spread to the US as well.
- Mark Kuznicki told us about Metronauts, a unique experiment in civic engagement being carried out by Metrolinx, our fledgeling regional transit authority.
- Dan, one of the denizens of the Centre for Social Innovation, introduced us to the Open Salad Club. We’ve got a lunch club at my office, where several people take turns making lunch, but somehow the idea of preparing a big dish, even if it’s only every couple of weeks, seems a bit intimidating to me. But bringing in two ingredients for salad? Easy.
Perhaps most interesting of all was hearing from David Patrick about how he, a filmmaker by trade, happened to found the
Linuxcaffe - to my knowledge, the world’s first “open source” coffee shop. Everything’s open - from the recipes to the software that runs the till. And naturally, there are open stage nights, not to mention DJ nights featuring Creative Commons-licensed music. But, I thought, what about a
really open stage?
Some hastily scribbled notes: Collaborations of all sorts would be encouraged. Performers could share words and music, free for others to jam on, revise and rework. Recordings would be available online to listen to and remix, and on-line contributions could feed back into the open stage. There would be show and tell time for homemade musical instruments and other gear (not coincidentally, Richard Bishop has installed one of his wonderful basses in a lamppost just outside the Caffe). I’m not sure yet what structure, or how much structure, would be needed to get such an event to work well and flow. Just something to experiment with. Stay tuned…
Wednesday 24 October 2007
Wanted: self-similar audio waveform generation
I’ve been listening to a podcast from last year featuring Will Wright and Brian Eno, talking about generative art, and it gave me an interesting idea.
There have been a lot of attempts at so-called “fractal music” (here’s a bunch of links to several such projects), but all the ones I’ve heard just take a chunk of data from, say, the Mandelbrot set, and map it to one musical scale or another. It’s hard to really hear any self-similarity happening.
Which seems a lost opportunity. Think about it: sound waveforms themselves have fractal properties, because phenomena like vibration, resonance and oscillation happen on all physical scales. Speed up a thumping rhythm far enough and eventually it turns into a tone. And any waveform can theoretically be expressed as a mix of sine waves of different pitches. Fractal generation software lets you zoom in and out to see different fractals in near-infinite detail. What if we could do the same by speeding up or slowing down a piece of audio?
A big challenge, of course, would the problem of resolution. Whether you’re working with analog or digital audio, as you slow it down you’ll eventually start to lose detail in the high frequencies, until it all goes muddy. It’s akin to blowing up a photograph, until all you can see is the grain, or a bunch of great big pixels - or conversely, shrinking it until you run out of photograph. You could always pack in more data to describe a chunk of sound, but you’d end up with a gigantic file, and you’d always hit a wall somewhere. For best results the sound from our hypothetical audio-fractal would have to be computed on the fly.
Not a new idea, but as far as I know no one’s done it yet. There’s an entry for something called “All-Music-Set Player” at Halfbakery (a “communal database of original, fictitious inventions") which is pretty close to the mark. I’m not interested in generating all music, just creating interesting sounds to explore.
Controls: speed, perhaps other parameters like density or default shape. It’d be interesting to work in some sort of “scrub” control too.
Issues: what language to write such a thing in? How do you describe the waveform? (some sort of generative grammar that sums wavelets?) How do you set up such a generator so that you can calculate a value for a sample at an arbitrary point on the time axis? Is it even possible? The fact that I can’t find any examples of fractal audio generators makes me wonder if the obstacle is simply one of processing power…
(The podcast that sparked all this, by the way, is from a seminar series put on by the Long Now Foundation: Ogg | MP3 | text summary I’m afraid of Spore. I think it might eat me.)
Friday 5 October 2007
Pine cones, glitches, and bringing video to the wilderness
Dorkbot Toronto, the local chapter of the network of “people doing strange things with electricity”, has a new slate of presentations, and last night was the first.
Patricia Rodriguez presented some of her video work using all sorts of cameras - film, video, digital - and taking advantage of each one’s unique features and most interesting ways of failing.
Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir’s work is about breaking down the perceived borders between nature and the human-made world, using electronic media installations in unexpected places. Wild Information Network, a solar-powered streaming audio server installed deep in the woods of the Catskills, plays sound pieces submitted by various artists, all with the notion of humans broadcasting to the broader environment, or vice versa. It and other pieces are catalogued on their site: EcoArtTech.net.
Stan Krzyzanowski showed his time-lapse work, ranging from handheld still camera shots, to mesmerizing animations created from successive sections of wood and other materials (notably vegetables and marbled cheese), to his recent projects involving cones from various sorts of tree. Pine cones, see, open up as they dry and fold closed again if you get them wet. And when sped up, the waving of a big pine cone’s scales takes on an eerie, almost animal aspect.
It’s beautiful stuff. Interval is a rather huge archive of all his experiments - click some of the “special sets” on the lower right. Most of the best stuff is on the “Favorites” page.
The sessions are held at InterAccess, a gallery at Queen and Ossington devoted to electronic media art. They offer a very cool series of workshops on topics like microcontroller programming, introductory electronics, pinhole photography, and hacking your bike to turn it into a mobile piece of sound art. I’m hoping to attend the ones on Pure Data and creating “resilient outdoor works”.
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Tuesday 4 September 2007
Photographic explorations on the Bruce Peninsula
I’m lucky enough to work at a small company full of cool people. All friends, all the sort of people you can have a good conversation with about aesthetics or theatre or philosophy, and hang out comfortably with for a week. So this past week we all packed up and headed to a cottage near the tip of the Bruce Peninsula.
There was some shop talk, like how to get more “good” clients - the kind of organizations that are trying to make the world better - and plotting strategy for our video department. We did a bit of improv and other creative exercises, too, and there was a lot of good food, light reading, ping-pong and beach-going, as well as some hiking along the northernmost part of the Bruce Trail, which runs all the way down the Escarpment to Niagara Falls.
I did a lot of poking around in the woods and along the lake. Funny thing - while everyone else is admiring the grand, sweeping vistas, I’m usually crouched with a magnifier studying the tiniest things I can find. So I spent a lot of time this trip puttering around with our camera, exploring the possibilities of macro photography.
Of the places we visited, I think my favorite was along the rocky shore at the end of the road. The ancient, glacier-carved sedimentary rock is like a garden of miniatures - every few inches you’ll find a little crevasse or a tiny pothole that’s become home to an even tinier plant or two, comprising a startling variety of species. And of course, there were lichens and mosses and ferns, whose primitive forms hold a strange fascination for me.
In the evenings we watched Rome on DVD (ah, what a horrible, lecherous, bloodthirsty lot) and played with the camera some more. After a few light-painting experiments using exposures of several seconds, we hitched the camera to Sean’s laptop, using a piece of software called iStopMotion to create our own animations, in the style of Pika Pika.
Sean’s gone and created a Flickr set of our experiments, and uploaded a video (click the “Read more” link). A few of my photos are up on Flickr as well.
In all, a wonderful week.
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Friday 10 August 2007
With the focus of this blog veering wildly about from electronics to urban design to music, I think it’s time to divide things up a bit. Over the next little while I’ll be shifting the DIY project talk ("mad scientisting”, as my SO likes to put it) to a new section called The Lab - better to have a home for it so people can find such posts without having to sort through my ramblings on pop culture and cats. And likewise, friends who want to keep up with those ramblings won’t have to go crosseyed at sudden dumps of Arduino or Flash code.
Likewise, I’m thinking of having a separate section for discussing urban design, public spaces and so forth. (A while back, in a giddy moment near the close of the Open Cities unconference, I promised to start a site or blog devoted to DIY projects in the public realm, and this would be the logical place to put it.) Music and art will probably be the “main” blog.
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Friday 3 August 2007
Three pieces. The first two were passed along by a fellow DIYer who’s working on interactive electronic public art (thanks Gabe!):
First up, the Graffiti Research Lab and their collaborators have produced a laptop / camera / projector setup that lets you paint on the side of a building.
Their software lets you define the contours of the wall you’re projecting onto, then tracks the position of a laser pointer beam using video fed from the camera, and draws the resulting lines - with some simulated paint dripping, for added effect. Naturally, it’s open source, complete with instructions.
Next, Body Movies by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Portraits are projected on a huge scale on walls surrounding a public square, revealed in the shadows thrown by passers-by. If people in the square arrange themselves in a matching pose, the projections switch. But much more interesting is the ways that people spontaneously interact, given the possibility of casting gigantic shadows of radically different sizes. It turns into instant mimed improv.
And finally, PIKA PIKA, a “lightning doodle project”. Doodler Takeshi explains:
We took a photo of each image using long exposures and put them together to make them look like one animation.
To work on this project,we went out to various places in Japan:parks,under the train track,the Tokyo Bay,school hallways,and so on.
We got all sorts of friends in different fields together to work on this project.
During the process,they got to know each other and discover new things. This is also about “communication”.
People can meet new friends as they create a piece art very easy which brings every one happiness.
We spend a very enjoyable evening at the workshop and the party through this animation.
The results are delightful to watch, too - it’s like a live performance of a Norman McLaren scratch-animation film, with luminous creatures and designs running riot through real physical spaces. I love how the “performers” are often faintly visible, but obscured, like bunraku puppeteers.
The beauty of these projects is how intuitive they are to use. Casting shadows, drawing with light… even if they’re a little tricky to get the hang of, the concept is utterly simple and inviting. And they let people think and interact with their whole bodies.
Now we need to make “computers for the rest of you.” GUI technology allows you to drag and drop, but it won’t notice if you twist and shout.
— Dan O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe, Physical Computing
The body is the large brain.
— Brian Eno
Tuesday 31 July 2007
Behold the two-digit display for the Box-O-Knobs (also seen here with its breadboarded ancestor). Each digit is run by one 74HC595 IC. Resistors everywhere. The reverse of the board is a bit hideous, I’m afraid, thanks to my still-amateurish soldering skills.
The vacated breadboard now sports five knobs (50k rotary pots), a MIDI socket and a photocell, which I’ve got controlling the sixth analog pin on the Arduino. A change on any input sends a MIDI controller message. The Evolver already has provision for reading in mod wheel, channel pressure (aftertouch), breath controller and foot pedal information, so I’ve got those wired in along with pitch bend and volume.
Next steps:
- figure out how to cut the appropriate slots in the top of a case
- wire up six slide pots as controls
- external input jacks that override the faders
- buttons!
- calibration and MIDI settings editable by the user, without having to recompile and upload new firmware.
Sunday 22 July 2007
I hit the electronics store the other day - sadly, they didn’t have any opto-isolators, so no MIDI input experiments this time round. But I scored some 74HC595 ICs, for the driving of LED displays and other digital outputs.
Here’s some code to run a common-cathode 7-segment display using the 595 (the Arduino site has a tutorial on how to hook up the 595, send data to it, and daisy-chain multiple ICs). I’ve included a list of which pins to connect to which anodes on the display in the character set file, below. Displays differ in their pinouts, so if you’ll likely need to do some testing to figure out how the pins are arranged.
charset_7seg.h - I spent a few minutes scribbling out a character set, and here it is as an #includeable file. (I put it in lib/targets/libraries/LED7Segment for the compiler to find.)
And here’s a test sketch. It lets you flip through the characters using a potentiometer on analog pin 0, but if you don’t have one handy you could easily adapt it to display the characters one by one.
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