Adrian Freed: Fueling imaginations

Dates: July 24 + July 25, 2010 from 10am to 5pm FULL

Description   

During this hands-on workshop we will survey Arduino platforms, libraries, shields and programming techniques for a broad range of musical and sound applications. We will learn how to synthesize useful wave shapes including square, sine, triangle and pulses, how to manage polyphony and timing and how to playback and record sampled sounds.

This bracelet has an Arduino-powered ring of white LED's with a 3-axis accelerometer tilt sensor.

How many interactions/games can you think of with this platform?

There are 3 in the video:

Hand in the air: flashes (because at a party you want to signal that you want someone to talk to?).

Horizontal hand: always illuminates the top LED's whatever rotation your arm has ("smart flashlight")

Spins of the wrist: a blob spins around in the same direction and slows to a stop.

This example uses the official OSC 1.1 SLIP wrapping for OSC serial messages.
Attached is an example Max/MSP patch to display the OSC messages which
represent the pin states, temperature and power supply voltages. You may need slipOSC
from the CNMAT downloads page to unwrap the USB serial OSC.

This example uses the official OSC 1.1 SLIP wrapping for OSC serial messages.
Attached is an example Max/MSP patch to display the OSC messages which
represent the pin states, temperature and power supply voltages. You may need slipOSC
from the CNMAT downloads page to unwrap the USB serial OSC.

{syntaxhighlighter brush: cpp;}
/*
* OSCuino
* Copyright 2009 Adrian Freed. All Rights Reserved
* Read and send the state of the Arduino pins to a host
* using the official Open Sound Control (OSC) 1.1 serial wrapping: slip
*
* version 0.95

Video of talk: http://myvideos.stanford.edu/player/slplayer.aspx?coll=4e71b33b-154f-452... Lecture 4.

I don't use the stock "official" Arduino boards for my work.

The $18 teensy 2.0 is smaller than any of the stock Arduinos, has more A/D pins than any of them except the Mega, has more memory, more PWM pins, full speed USB serial support and has a more accurate crystal cock instead of a resonator. You can buy them from the designer ($18) or from Lady Ada ($20).
Sketch loading and restart is much faster because of the high speed USB port.

I presented various Wiimote alternatives such as the Gametrak, how to interface Nunchucks to uOSC and a quick tutorial using Max/MSP for gesture signal processing.

Drupal modules exist to implement best practices in web interactivity for a wide range of media types.Taming coding bugs, configuration challenges and coherent theming for these modules is a real chore. I will share successful techniques I have employed in developing a recent rich media site covering:

Recent attempts to extend organology to add useful classifications of electrophones and music controllers have rightly focussed on music performance gestures . The naive approach of classification by gestural types (strum, pluck, hit, slap etc..) fails because gestures say more about musicians and their music than their instruments.

The Fingerboard Instruments: Reframing Lutherie without Strings, Freed, Adrian , 3rd Music and Cognition Conference, McGill University, Montreal, (2010)

Joy of Hex and the Cordless Guitars of the Future, Freed, Adrian , Identites de la Guitare Electrique, 05/18/2009, Paris, France, (2009)

This wireless variant of Hannah Perner Wilson's fabric tilt sensor uses embroidereded high electrical resistance thread . I designed the tool path to create a resistive track from the patches that can be used as a potential divider . This results in a more continuous estimate of the ball location than is suggsted by the six apparently-discrete patches.