Containerized Particulate

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.

Oh hey, Internet. Long time no see. Sorry I haven’t been keeping in very good touch, but you’ll no doubt be thrilled to learn that I’ve been keeping myself pretty busy, despite appearances to the contrary around here. Right now I’m in the middle of building an Arduino-based robotic percussionist, and I figured it might be handy for myself and (hopefully) others if I aggregated some of the websites I’ve learned from along the way. At the very least it’ll get me back into the habit of posting here. The idea is to construct a self contained hardware unit that takes MIDI input (from a computer, drum machine, whatever), and outputs voltage to a solenoid array. Anyways,

one – Instructibles.com link to a MIDI in Arduino shield. The parts list is handy, though I have no desire to etch my own board for this particular project. Not getting any serial data? Try switching the pins on the input jack. Seriously. Try it.

two – Arduino MIDI library. Obvious, but pay attention; this is an important one. Google “MIDI arduino library” and you’ll get the (in my opinion) inferior “MIDI Library V2″. There’s some useful information hanging around distributions of that library, but I’ve found Willmans MIDI library to be considerably more functional.

three – A stupidly simple schematic for controlling transistor relays with an Arduino. Simple but functional, and the hardware for each relay will only set you back about 75 cents.

Taken together, these three links should be about all you need to get a similar MIDI tapper running. I’ve seen quite a few projects like this out there, and I’m pretty sure this will yield a low cost rig that’s as functional as any. Right now I’m just waiting on some solenoids in the post, but once they arrive, I’ll throw up some video of the assembled product in action, along a less jargony post for those wondering what the hell I’m talking about.

Here’s a few days worth of time-lapse footage from outside my window. Sound thrown together last night. March weather. Zany.

How’s the Weather from Jared Arave on Vimeo.

Hey look, it’s another picture of a Max patch, what a surprise.

The plan was to explore the compositional potential of difference tones, by making them a little more immediately accessible by way of a little tone generator synth thing. I’m at a bit of a dead end though, because it seems to me that the volume levels necessary to get the effect to work are so high that my hearing and my sanity would be completely shot before I ever got around to finishing anything. Similarly, someone would really have to crank the playback volume to be able to subject themselves to the highly unpleasant sensation that difference tones provide.

If all that’s adaquate endorsement, try it yourself: here. As for me, I’m putting all this on the back burner, and filling under ‘not so cool’.

Rupert is a self oscillating sound thing, largely the creation of one Justin Smith, ported from PD to Max5 and tweaked by myself. Basically, you draw in some waveforms, twiddle with some sliders, and you’re off. A pretty astonishing range of sounds are possible; clicky rhythmic stuff, drones, noise washes, melodic phrases. It’s hard to say exactly what each slider does, so I didn’t. Sometimes a control will be extremely responsive, other times, not so much. Just experiment and have fun (and be sure to take the waveforms out of the initial ‘noise’ state, or you’ll get just that).

download here (Max 5 Runtime Required)

Also, if you happen to have an iphone / itouch and the mrmr OSC controller (available free from the app store) you can download the control file for rupert here, and use your new-fashioned gadget as a remote control – What fun! All you need to do is get rupert running on your computer, get rupert.mmr loaded into mrmr, then give mrmr the IP of the machine running the synth (hopefully). Supports multiple clients, for collaborative mayhem.

Enjoy; Any feedback is much appreciated (pun intended).

So, the unwieldy process of editing 3+ HTML pages every time I wanted to edit the ol’ webpage finally pushed me into PHP land, where I’ll be blindly fumbling about for the next several months. Java script and .css aren’t really my native languages, but I hear immersion’s a pretty good way to learn these things. Oh, and if you’re reading this via deathbyhonor.com/blog, just point your browser to http://deathbyhonor.com; it’s integrated now.

Also, Dames:

I bring up Busby Berkely not only to offset the horrible teduim of the 1st half of this post, but also because I see his aesthetic all over the place, as digital mirror and kaliedescope effects become more accessible (particularly to young editors). I’ve seen countless of these unintentional, digital Berkley-alikes – particularly after introducing the Jitter ‘jit.rota’ object to a workshop full of students – and this is fine. It’s just constructive to bear in mind that this territory was covered 70+ years ago, without the aid of computers, and that Berkely’s work can serve as an excellent starting point for investigations into one’s own contemporary digital hyper-geometric-kaliedeography.

Hey internet – how’s it going? Sorry I haven’t been around much of late – I’ve been working my little heart out for PIFF, and what an IFF it was. But, lucky you, all that’s behind me now, so we should be spending a lot more time together in the coming weeks. In fact, as a token of my sincere regret regarding this neglegence, here’s a little something I made for you;

Patch available here;
You’ll need Max/MSP 5 ($$$) or Max Runtime (free), from Cycling ‘74.

It’s a demonstration of Diana Deutsch’s scale illusion, wherein your brain essentially chooses pitch based grouping cues over location based ones. It works best (or is most impressive?) with headphones on, although it’s also pretty cool on speakers that are modestly spaced. There’s a built in tone generator to play with, or you can kill the audio and route the midi to the DAW of your choice and feed it to a couple hard panned synths. The score on the bottom reflects what’s actually being piped to each channel. Also, try muting and unmuting channels, to get a sense of what’s going on, and I *may* have messed up some of the modal intervals… so no promises.

I plan on making a few more of these simple patches that demonstrate perceptual oddities. Beyond being (I think) really interesting, they’re also sparking a lot of creative thought, and leading me in some pretty interesting compositional directions. Also, let it not be said I failed to post in the month of February.