Containerized Particulate

Just a brief update before I lose sight of this stuff;

I’ve lately decided to spend a lot more time with Supercollider, which doesn’t serve as well for prototyping as something like Max/MSP or PD, but has already proven to have a lot of the same functionality, given a willingness to actually deal with code. sc140 contains a lot of excellent examples of the kinds of complexity you can get with relatively little code, and  is easily my favorite thing involving twitter *ever*. Also, whenever I have the time, I plan to sit down with ixi, and see what that’s all about. The goal I have in mind is a Supercollider… synth? program?… that will take OSC input from one or more running instances of Isadora during a live performance. Ideally, I’d act as a kind of ‘operator’, routing, scaling and biasing various OSC signals to appropriate parameters within the synthesizer, creating a live indeterminate composition with clear correlations with the video being projected. I’ll post interesting and useful code / resources as I work my way through this process.

True! Beyond (hopefully) looking and behaving much better, a lot of old stuff is now more organized / available. So uh, yeah.

So we’ve finally reached some kind of finished-like-state with the midiglock. I’ll be putting media up over in the new section I’ve made for it over the next few days (hint: it’s on the left, under ‘projects’). Expect it to take a little while; my computer doesn’t render video like it used to.

Yes indeed. Some of the subtleties of velocity differentiation are lost on this video, but if nothing else, it’s made these bells much less irritating to listen to. Low PWM and high frequency also yields some very cool modem / printer like tones. What’s even less obvious is a total rewrite of the code, which should make it a breeze to upgrade this thing to a 3 octave glock + Arduino Mega.

Here’s some footage of a fraction of the final solenoids, working fully. The input in this video is Lives MIDI out; I scrubbed the tempo up to 999 to get the actuators to freak out like that. You can see a bit of the lovely armature that Whit and I rigged up yesterday, as well as the clips that’ll allow the solenoids to be moved around without much fuss. A few things I’ve learned from this setup, so far.

1. Don’t use a switching power supply with solenoids.
2. Don’t tamper with solenoid coils.
3. Tiny plunger = short duty cycle.

preemptive satisfaction from Jared Arave on Vimeo.

Fixed up a friends guitar, and ended up replacing a broken pickup with a little squank generator / distortion unit. Zany!

guitar.repair++ from Jared Arave on Vimeo.