learning the ropes

I wasn’t quite sure where the project was heading, but I needed to experiment with something physical. I was considering an interface that would scrub audio at human scale; in order words, I could perform a piece of audio (or video for that matter), by attaching myself to a simulated tape reel. In this way, I could walk or run through the linear media, with the motion of my body driving the playback. My building focused on how to detect this linear motion.

I started out with a motor, thinking I could detect the positive and negative voltages it would generate as it was turned.. Arduino takes 0-5 volts on its analog inputs, though, and I wasn’t sure how to convert the positive and negative voltages from the motor.

The Physical Computing book had an example of using a potentiometer to detect motion, so I tried to prototype that system.

Ultimately, what I discovered is that the modified potentiometer didn’t work reliably. The “stop” I removed left a dead space in the resistance range that fluctuated as I turned through it. There seemed to be a pattern, but I felt that the code to smooth out this abnormal behavior would be prone to breaking. I needed some other way to detect rotation.

As I started to think about what to perform for next class next week, there were two major themes: pulling and pushing. I was also inspired by the Markov chains we studied in Algorithmic Composition. On the right is a “Monome” like board for driving an algorithmic composition.

Exploring the idea that “translation can be seen as a process that, when used literally, can provide unexpected and compositionally interesting outcomes” — using translation as a generator. I used the Google Translator to do the translation.

I tried a couple of sessions with the translator and the following two examples are the funniest I produced.

When I lived in Texas many years ago, I could sometimes tune into a radio station from Mexico. At night, it played rock music in English. I heard “Hotel California” for the first time on that station. I always laughed when the DJ announced the songs, because he did it in “Tex-Mex” (or Spanglish as it is called here on the East Coast)…
“La voz de GunsandRoses”…
“La presencia de ACDC”…
The reason I mention this in the context of the above assignment is that during the day, the radio station played English-language pop music in Spanish. At the time, you could hear songs like “End of the Road” by Boys II Men, sung as “Vamos al fin de camino” (or something like that… it has been a really long time. A couple of weeks ago I heard a Beatles song sung in Spanish or Portuguese playing in the ITP lounge. It seems to me now that doing those translations well is probably a tricky operation.

So… this first attempt at the translation assignment involves part of a song that I first heard on the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack.

Stuck in the Middle with You
(Stealers Wheel)
English: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right
I am stuck in the middle with you.

Spanish: Payasos a la izquierda de mí, bromistas a la derecha
Me pegan en el centro con ti.

English: Clowns to the left of me, joking to the right
They beat to me in center with you.

Spanish: Payasos a la izquierda de mí, bromeando a la derecha
Batieron a mí en el centro con ti.

English: Clowns to the left of me, joking to the right
They beat in center to me with you.

German: Clowne auf der linken Seite ich, scherzend rechts
Sie schlugen in der Mitte zu mir mit dir.

English: Clowne on the left side I, joking right
They struck in the center to me with you.

German:
Clowne auf der linken Seite I, nach rechts scherzend
Sie schlugen in der Mitte zu mir mit dir an.

French:
Clowne page gauche I, vers la droite plaisantant
Ils ont attaché dans le milieu à moi avec te.

English:
Clowne left page I, towards the line joking
They attached in the medium to me with you.

Spanish:
Clowne dejó la página I, hacia la línea el bromear
Unieron en el medio a mí con ti.

English:
Clowne left page I, towards the line joking
They united in means to me with you.

German:
Clowne ließ Seite I, in Richtung zur Linie Scherzen
Sie vereinigten in den Mitteln zu mir mit dir.

French:
Le Clowne a laissé la page I, en direction à la ligne à des plaisanteries
Ils ont uni dans les moyens à moi avec te.

English:
Clowne left page I, in direction with the line with jokes
They linked in the means with me with you.

Perhaps you’ve encountered an instruction manual that didn’t quite read properly in English? Some of the phrases are pretty funny. I found an example in the manual of my Fostex Digital Multitracker VF-16.

Before Operating the Fostex Digital Multitracker VF-16
(originally written in Japanese)
Please read the overview before going any farther with your new recorder as it will save you a lot of time in the long run.

Spanish: Leer por favor la descripción antes de ir más lejos con tu registrador nuevo pues te ahorrará mucho tiempo a largo plazo.

English: To please read the description before going more far with your new recorder because it will save long time in the long term to you.

Spanish: Para satisfacer leer la descripción antes de ir más lejos con tu registrador nuevo porque ahorrará de largo plazo al largo plazo a ti.

English: In order to satisfy to read the description before going more far with your new recorder because it will save of long term to the long term you.

Italian: Per per soddisfare per leggere la descrizione prima di andare più lontano con il vostro nuovo registratore perché li conserverà del lungo termine al lungo termine.

English: For in order satisfying in order to read the description before going more far away with your new recorder because it will conserve them of along term to along term.

Italian: Per in ordine che soddisfa per leggere la descrizione prima di andare più faraway con il vostro nuovo registratore perché li conserverà lungo del termine lungo al termine.

English: For in order that satisfies in order to read the description before going more faraway with your new recorder because it will conserve them along of the long term to the term.

Spanish: Para para que satisfaga para leer la descripción antes de ir más lejano con tu registrador nuevo porque los conservará adelante del largo plazo al término.

English: For so that it satisfies to read the description before going furthermost with your new recorder because it will conserve them in front of the long term to the term.

We played with the Sony DSP-V77 multi-effect processor this afternoon and found some good and bad effects.

The first bad thing we found was that the EEPROM battery is running low (or maybe even dead). We couldn’t get the unit to start up at first. Fortunately, initializing the unit got us up and running again.

Factory Reset
1. Turn unit off
2. Hold down SYSTEM and ENTER buttons while powering on, until you see “Initialized” on the screen.

There were a couple presets that might be useful for the ghost voices in Urinetown.

Bank 1 #11 – Large Hall
Bank 1 #15 – 3D Catheral
User 1 #19
User 1 #1 – Magic Space

There was also a Darth Vader mode that might be useful for Christmas Carol.

The following pictures document how to change the apparent size of a reverb room simulation.

Use the edit button to, well, you know… edit!

We also played with the Alesis MidiVerb (which has nasty digital sounding reverb tails). The following presets might be useful.

#68 – Vocal Plate
#96 – Med Hall

The Assignment:
Pick a known narrative (or create your own) and give the ‘reader/audience’ control over it. These will be performed next week.

My Challenge:
Coming up with an idea in a reasonable time — and then implementing it. I didn’t connect with much in the readings this week, save for the “Design as Storytelling” piece. So, hearkening back to the whirlwind days of making work for Spatial Design, I finally forced myself to crank out this project yesterday.

What Happened:
I build a Mad Libs Karaoke Machine using Processing and a little bit of sneaky AutoHotKey macro trickery. The program, which look quite a bit like a minimalist PowerPoint presentation, prompted the audience for a series of words, under the premise of collaboratively writing a story. As the audience responded verbally to the computer, I typed in their answers. After the final word was entered, the program took all of the audience-selected words and inserted them into a specially tagged version of lyrics for “Hotel California.” The audience was unaware of the gag they were about to participate in: the story they were writing was really an alternate set of lyrics I was going to sing with them. They were surprised to hear the familiar guitar arpeggio as the song began. I was more surprised when my program crashed before I could move to the first line of modified lyrics. That was a big bummer — but I think I proved the strength of the concept.

(more…)

We’re reading a selection called “Multimedia and Performance” for Performing Technology. It’s a chronology of the development of performance art from the mid 1960s through the late 1990s. Although our theme for the week is “Theater and Narrative,” I’m having a hard time discerning the concept of narrative in the pieces; however, the story of the chronology of the pieces seems like an interesting narrative and so I’ve tried to illustrate it as a map. I’m not sure if this is useful, but the dense text made it difficult to sort out who was working with who and who they influenced.

I tried to use Bubbl.us to do this, but it made a big mess. What I really want is a tool that let’s me describe relationships as text…

Person
created/exhibited/performed: [blah] – when – where
influenced: [person]
collaborated with: [person] – when
part of: [group]

This sounds a lot like a social networking site. I want to be able to display a timeline of these events, or a cloud of related information.

As I was trying to wade through James Corner’s “The Agency of Mapping”, I decided to try a little mapping experiment of my own.

View Larger Map

This experiment doesn’t quite reflect the depth that Mr. Corner brings to his essay, but it does reveal some interesting biases in the author’s research. I’ve plotted the birthplaces of “mappers” that Corner mentions in his essay along with links I could find to their work — much of it in Google Books. It is interesting to note that all of the mappers he mentions were born in the western hemisphere and are male.

Today as I was coming home from Conflux 2007, I had the notion to take pictures of yellow things.

I attended Conflux 2007 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at the suggestion of Rachel Adams, who is teaching “Widespread-Content: Mapping.” The most enjoyable thing all day was taking a walk in Williamsburg guided by a fictional hurricane evacuation story called “Water, Water Everywhere” by Jennifer Treuting. I’ve created a map of my walk that is a subset of the map she presented.

View Larger Map

It’s interesting how a made up story was able to give me a context with which to explore a new area — and remember it very well. Usually when I’m walking in the city, there is nothing to anchor memories and I never know the stories behind the places I see.

I came to ITP partially to take New Instruments for Musical Expression. My entrance essay discussed my desire to study and develop Interactive Music Systems, and I started off by building a few — in Physical Computing, in Living Art, and then again (partially) in Designing for Constraints. Feeling that I’ve already worked on some of the territory covered in NIME, I decided to take Performing Technology instead. As I write this, it occurs to me that my love of music has always fallen closer to the performance rather than the interface for performing. It has been the act of playing the instrument rather than formal understanding it and its capabilities that satisfies me. At other times, I have acted and sung — always finding inspiration in the rush that accompanies the moment the performance begins.

I’m finding intersections between performance and mapping as we begin this class and as I enter “Wide Spread Content: Mapping”. Something intrigues me about the connection between the plan (script, manuscript, situation — the map) and the performance it enables. I hope to discover more about this and to do some performing myself.