learning the ropes

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.

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