The original(s) should be recognizable, but you should think about saying something new in your reframing/remixing of the original material.
LISTENING: Masonna 'Frequency L.S.D.'
I can split my own daily listening habits into two categories:
The first is music which I use to augment my daily activities, typically while commuting and working. The second is music I listen to as an end in itself, while doing little or nothing else. There is some overlap between the two, but not much.
If I’m listening to music while commuting or working, it has to be something which, first and foremost, has a strong sense of rhythm which I can nod my head to without having to think very hard. It can be something which evokes pretty much any mood or emotion, thought I find things that somehow evoke more complex emotions (i.e. simultaneous gloom + physical energy, violence + calm, chaos + focus) the most interesting. It has to be something with great attention paid to sonics and atmosphere, whether it be using primarily electronic instruments (i.e. electronica, synthpop, italo disco), primarily acoustic instruments (i.e. exotica, library music), and/or elaborate or adventurous manipulation of non electronic sounds and instruments (i.e. krautrock, underground disco, obscure psych records, 60s girl groups, Joe Meek, ABBA). I have little or no interest in lyrical content nor allegiance to traditional verse-chorus-verse song structure, and extended instrumentals and 15+ minute long tracks are welcomed. Since I typically try not to pay attention to lyrics I’m very open to vocals in languages I can’t comprehend and vocals distorted or vocoded to the point of unintelligibility. In fact, I often prefer them. I want something that propels me forward without requiring my attention (hence singer-songwriter music, folk music, or anything with a heavy focus or lyrical content over sonics are out), but is interesting enough to listen to as an end in itself should it find itself in the foreground of my thoughts (so a lot of techno, house, and trance are out since they seem, to me, to necessitate large social gatherings and/or drug use in order to be enjoyed properly). Typically I find music that fits into my parameters also very good for social gatherings in which my iPod or laptop finds its way to the stereo.
So that’s what I listen to as far as ‘background music’. But sometimes, usually 2 or 3 times a week when I’m at home at night am not going out, I want to just sit there, doing little or nothing else, and listen to the most bizarre, difficult, and/or punishing music I can find. I have found this, by and large, in noise music. Noise music by definition is based around harsh, distortion-heavy sound with very minimal, if any, use of rhythm or melody. Some is improvised, some is very carefully composed, but the objective is always unrelenting sonic assault over traditional musicality. Many of the best works are released vinyl-only in small editions, and the act of looking through my shelving unit for the LP I want, placing it on the turntable, and sitting still and listening for 30+ minutes takes on sort of a ritualistic feeling. The hidden structure of the music and creative voice of the artist reveals itself upon repeated listenings in a way which makes a good noise record a richer and more enjoyable experience upon each listen.
Complete Arduino code here.
I've built all the functionality I want for this semester for the CrudBox (I plan on continuing with it for NIME and likely beyond). Check out the video.
It can now remember 4 different loops. You can see which one you're one on the 7 segment display and scroll to different ones with the rotary encoder knob next to it. The tempo can now be seen on the 4 LEDs in the lower right corner.
To reiterate how it works:
There are 4 speaker terminals on the box, into each of which you can plug any object that can run on 5 volts. In the video I've plugged in LEDs because it makes the interaction clearer, but my main interest is in plugging motors in, attaching them to the box, and amplifying the sounds they make. Each speaker terminal has a button and a pot. Pay attention to which of the 4 tempo LEDs is on, then press a button, then let go. It will switch on the object (motor, LED, etc), then switch it off when you let go. The next time it cycles through the loop of 4 LEDs it will switch on and off at the same points. The object will pulsewidth modulate at different speeds depending on what position the pot is in when you switched it on. You can do this up to 8 times and can change the PWM with each one, then do the same with the 3 other objects.
Whatever number is currently displayed on the 7seg display is the number of the loop you've created. Turn the rotary encoder and the number will change, and you can do what you just did with this new loop. The 7segment display shows numbers 1-4, so you can record 4 different loops.
The code above uses 1 MC14067BCP analog multiplexer for all the switches and knobs for the 4 objects. The rotary encoder and the erase button use digital pins directly on the Arduino. The output is two 74HC595 shift registers in sequence, one for the 7segment display and one for the objects output.
Online version here (right click and hit "Play").
Java code here.
.fla file here.
Currently I only have one of the additions to my midterm project working: my homemade text to speech translator using my own voice. It was fairly straighforward to build and program. Here's how I did it:
1) Obtain a list of every possible phoneme from the Rita getPhonemes() method.
2) Recorded myself saying every one of said phonemes and converting them to mp3s.
3) Do getPhonemes() on a piece of text
4) Read the array given by getPhonemes() into Flash
5) Each phoneme of a word is separated by a dash. Split each word into an array divided by these dashes.
6) Create a function which plays one mp3 at a time, pausing for the duration of the mp3 before moving to the next one.
In this example I used text from Michael Gira's "Why I Ate My Wife". My original idea was to use text from my dreams, but I haven't remembered more than five seconds of any dreams I've had since I presented my final idea 3 weeks ago.
What doesn't work (yet):
I wrote a method which gets all the holoynyms of each word (using getHolonym()), then "crawls" all of those words and looks for their holonyms. This piece of text has a strong focus on the body so I looked for words which would return the word "body" or similar words. From there it would use the Flickr API to find images tagged with that word, then displays them in some form when the word they're related to appears on screen in the Flash movie.
Sadly the methods of RitaWN are giving me a lot of trouble even in very straighforward situations and I get an error about which I've found absolutely no useful documentation online.
For some reason, I could not get many functions in RitaWN to work, even simple ones in simple circumstances, so that and the Flickr API will have to wait.
I made my own 7 segment LED with 21 LEDs and a small piece of perfboard. I had planned on using a normal premade 7 seg display, but I fried 2 of the 3 I bought trying to use them with a 16 channel LED driver chip and a darlington array (i gave them too much power and some of the segments burnt out), and I couldn't find the third one, and in a rush to accomplish something I ended up building this. It took a few very focused hours of soldering. I really dig the look, definitely something of a happy accident.
Since I don't have enough digital outs left on my Arduino for a 7 segment LED driver chip I had to control it through my chain of shift registers. I had to manually write an array for which shift register pins to switch on and off for digits 0 through 9. Here it is:
int digitArray[] = {//zero
1,1,1,1,0,1,1,
//one
0,0,1,1,0,0,0,
//two
0,1,1,0,1,1,1,
//three
0,1,1,1,1,1,0,
//four
1,0,1,1,1,0,0,
//five
1,1,0,1,1,1,0,
//six
1,1,0,1,1,1,1,
//seven
0,1,1,1,0,0,0,
//eight
1,1,1,1,1,1,1,
//nine
1,1,1,1,1,1,0
};
And here's two examples of it in action. The top video shows it counting 1... 2... 3... 4... with the tempo of the loop. The bottom video shows it moving from 0 to 9 as I turn the shift register.
Arduino code here.
Processing code here.
For this assignment I added some simple filtering to my homemade color sensor code. I added a button which you press when there is no object on top of the color sensor, and it records the color values and will stop spitting out color values serially if the red, green, and blue values are all within 10 of the value recorded when the button was pressed. So basically once you do this, if nothing is on top of the sensor it will stop sending values until you do put something on it. It works well, exactly as described, but of course it could create problems if you're testing an object that actually is that color! Being that I'm still not sure what people would use a homemade color sensor for besides various zany interactive art things I'm not sure if that's a problem.
The one project I'm planning on using this sensor for is an installation in a large room in which I'm going to mount a bunch of them all over the walls of a large empty room. I'm going to hand out flashlights of various colors and allow people to control sounds by pointing the flashlights at the sensors all over the room. For this project the filter should be useful, since I don't want any sounds happening if there isn't a bright light being pointed directly at the sensor.
