learning the ropes

I’m working with Shinyoung on a project called “Dust” for Wearables.

“Dust” is a discrete, wearable character who offers spoken affirmation and support in response to “deflated” gestures.

Initially we tried sensing a sigh in order to trigger Dust’s affirmations. We planned to mount a stretch sensor inside a waist-belt and sense the expansion and contraction of the wearer’s diaphragm. Preliminary experiments with the stretch sensor did not yield favorable results. The stretch sensor seems to be optimized for applications involving greater ranges of motion.

We decided to try a different approach. It may be possible to use pleated material with conductive thread or fabric between the pleats to sense the sigh. In the pictures below, I am pleating a section of fabric to create a prototype of the gesture sensing mechanism.

Shlomit and I are proposing a final project around visualizing the propagation of sound and exploring the physicality of sound.

One of our ideas is an installation which captures the evolution of sound in a space. Colored lights suspended from the ceiling of the space react to sounds created in the space. We draw our inspiration from the ephemeral quality of warm breath in cold winter air. As you exhale, a gentle fog issues from your lips into the surrounding air.

Other ideas surrounding this first proposal are issues of memory and the incarnational power of words. The words we speak and the words we hear are not mere acoustical vibrations. They carry meaning. What if we could see these vibrations as they occured? What if we could see lingering traces of these vibrations?

Our second idea is an installation where the viewer walks through a field of flexible reeds. As the reeds are pushed aside, pleasant sounds are created in the space.

I spoke with Peter today about the difficulty I was having with the with fftin~ and fftout~ objects in MAX. He suggested I try the fffb~ object instead, which he used in the past to create a real-time frequency analyzer. I’ll give it a try this weekend.

I’m not sure how to react to this reading. I don’t think I’ve listened to minimal music, yet. Perhaps I should try to find some. Composers mentioned in the reading were La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Perhaps the Avery Fischer Media Collection at Bobst has recordings. It would be even more ideal if there was a place online to listen — and in fact there is. We have access to The Anthology of Recorded Music

I’ll have more to say after I hear some.

I’m working to figure out how to analyze the dominant frequency of an audio signal. This takes me into the world of fft~. In an effort to avoid further reading, I search the MAX/MSP forums for audio to midi conversion.

This yields a patch called fiddle~ which is supposed to follow pitch. The fiddle patch appears to only run on Macintosh… it requires externals.

I return to the MAX/MSP documentation and try to puzzle over fft~. I read the tutorials in chapters 25 and 26. The documentation seems to present a progression. The fft~ object performs basic Fast Fourier Transforms, but doesn’t take into account the overlap (?) of sample bins. I was skimming, so this is all a little unclear. All I’m looking to do is take frequency readings every “n” seconds in order to construct a “melody” out of some recorded speech. The tutorials seem to indicate I’ll need to “window” my samples and that the pfft~ object takes this problem into account. There’s even a diagram of a patch that shows how to read off the current frequency. The problem is, I don’t know how to create an embedded subpatch for pfft~ to use. I try, instead, to create a named subpatch.

This works, but I found that the output I was sending out of the subpatch I create didn’t change at all. Reading the tutorial more closely:

Note that in the above example the number~ object is used for the purposes of demonstration only in this tutorial. When DSP is turned on, the number displayed in the signal number box will not appear to change because the signal number box by default displays the first sample in the signal vector, which in this case will always be 0. To see the center frequency values, you will need to use the capture~ object or record this signal into a buffer~.

I added a capture~ object to the output of my test program, but this didn’t work.

MAX/MSP Patch (.zip)

Quotes:
“Neuhaus aims for a tuning of sound and place as an expanded instrument”
- One of my interests is in the design of musical instruments that are readily playable in improvizational settings with very low barriers to participation.

“… making the experimental strand of musical practice susceptible to a different set of conditions and questions”

“Neuhaus invited an audience or listener to claim the work for him or herself.”

“At that moment [Public Supply I] became a group activity — a process of people making sound together, listening to it, and adjusting what they did according to what was going on. I think this is the heart of the musical process — this dialogue”
- Yes. I tried an improvizational music-making experiment on Tuesday night in my Designing for Constraints class which explored a bit of this idea.

“Concentrating on this field of sound creates a heightened involvement with a given environment, as a means of cartographically locating sounds, their possible sources, and their meanings, not entirely as communicable message, but as an environmental condition”
- Seems to echo Pauline Oliveros’ essay on deep listening. Listening becomes more than just concentrating deeply when experiencing music or sonic art. Perhaps I can make the comparison to an idea regarding drawing I read which related to the creative practices of Leonardo Da Vinci. I have experienced in drawing an understanding of the mechanics of that which I draw. Beyond the artistic composition of a drawing there lies a body of knowledge of the object of the drawing — the way in which that object behaves: response to light, intersections of its components, the dynamics of its motion. The rendering of an object’s image on paper draws upon this understanding. I wonder if the same is not true of sound: something of the structure and mechanics of an object are illuminated through careful listening.

“temporalizing space”

For further research:
Minimalism

Last night, in preparation for building a perf board, I drew a first draft of the schematic for the Secret Tree.

There are several things to do yet to properly document the project’s electronics:

• Add the clock crystal and other required components for the ATMEGA-8
• Draw a system block diagram
• Draw the finite state machines (although this may be overly complicated

Anyone have suggestions on how to simplify this schematic?

This afternoon I attempted to connect the Secret Tree circuit board to the LEDs on the tree. Since my test program (adapted from an Arduino tutorial) appeared to be working well I was ready. The first six LED clusters I connected to the terminal blocks worked fine, but the seventh and eighth clusters didn’t operate properly. I tried resetting the Arduino board as well as the MAX patch, but things wouldn’t work consistently. I even saw that a single LED connected to the seventh output didn’t light up consistently. Once I disconnected all of the clusters and returned to single LEDs, the system seemed to function properly. Maybe the LED clusters are drawing too much current and are causing the digital potentiometers to behave erratically.

Back at home, I found a small breadboard wiring problem: I didn’t have a proper connection to ground for the pins 15, 18, 19, and 22 on the second AD5206. Even so, the LEDs connected to the potentiometer outputs related to those pins still lit up. My correction only served to properly extinguish the LEDs when I set the potentiometers on that side of the chip to the maximum 10K resistance.

The light blue wire connected to ground above the AD5206 is the recent addition.

So far, I have tried the following in order to get the software/hardware system working:

• Corresponded with Scott Fitzgerald regarding the MAX patch. He removed the multiple “metro” objects from it and recommended running the system at 9600 baud so as not to overwhelm the PC’s serial buffer.
• Spoke with Leif Krinkle about the MAX patch. He questioned my use of the SimpleMessageSystem for MAX and thought I would be better served by a basic home-brew protocol. I started rewriting the Arduino code and the MAX patch to use a simple protocol based on sending Arduino six bytes of information from MAX using the “pack” object”. I originally asked him how to debug the MAX patch since Arduino and MAX were communicating over the Arduino’s only serial port. It turns out that there is a software serial library that could be used to do this type of debugging.
• Discovered in the course of rewriting the serial protocol that the switch needs debouncing. This is the source of the strange values I saw in MAX/MSP with my new serial code.

Tomorrow I will try using a power supply with more amperage to see if that improves things. Any other suggestions?