Posts Tagged ‘cameroon’

A much-needed respite, an overdue update

Monday, November 12th, 2007

Friend, I have been absent due to a disgusting illness.

Nowdays I’m working on the following:

  • Cameroon Project—yesterday Harlo and I picked up some inexpensive crank-based power supplies from Ocean State Job Lot. Next step is dissecting them and seeing what can be modded to work with the toy. Last week while wheezing and expelling, I mocked up the voice chip’s demo circuit on a breadboard but had a strange problem: I can’t seem to make the mic work. When I press play I can hear that I’ve recorded the noise naturally made by the pins floating, but somewhere in the recording process the signal is either being lost or never being generated at all. Anyone had any experience with this chip? Google yields some good applications and examples but no users have had this issue (makes me think I’m really fucking something simple up here).
  • South Africa—Dear one, have I even told you about this? Or am I keeping you in the dark? My apologies!
    This project involves taking some samples of native South African instruments recorded by my friend Thenji (part of Curious AV) and muxing them into something usable for the score of her upcoming film. So far I’ve been in the cut-and-experiment phase of the project, but I’ve committed to have three or so working models of songs by December first. Here’s the first go at a tune, made with Ableton:
    Kalimba(draft)
    I’m taking this as an opportunity to further flesh out my max/msp interface, the woods, and add some useful features it’s been missing. It wouldn’t be fair to harp on about my own interface without crediting Keith Fullerton Whitman, whose presentation of his “H Mod” interface in 2003 at a Harvard Aritst Workshop was truly inspiring. You really should go give some time to the rest of his site (and, it goes without saying, his music). He is a good man, and he has a good brain. The wonderful part of this interface is that the main images on his screen (the four groovemodule waveforms in rad colors) are literally parts of his RAM - the mapping is that direct, and it allows you to easily see what’s interacting with what, what’s going to make your machine hang, etc. I’m not the fan of external VST modules that Keith is, but I can’t dispute the man’s sound, and that sound is gorgeous.
  • Grad School App—Well, shit. I’ve secured vacation time to get my online portfolio super-ready, I’ve tried to make friends with some of the awesome people in the Hyperinstrument group (although no luck getting a meeting with Tod, the Leader), but damn it if the professors I had hoped would write my recommendations are un-reachable. Jef Huang, my awesome Physical Computing prof, has always been a bit difficult to get in touch with, but I was really hoping I’d be able to secure something, anything from him. It’s truly unfortunate but in some ways telling that the professors I admired the most were destined never to become full-time Harvard staff; Jef’s in Switzerland at an institution that seems to have a far better handle on what new art is, Peggy Phelan is in sunny Stanford, and Elisabeth Subrin is working all along the East Coast. Dammit!

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    20071018 Check in

    Thursday, October 18th, 2007

    Buddy, last night I fulfilled a commitment I made to a bar in my area. I am not bragging, but I thought you should know.

    I have some updates on other projects as well:

    I’ll be making more progress on the Cameroon project once I’ve got the dorkbot commitments. Fortuitously, Chelly will be in the States this Christmas, allowing me to push the deliverable deadline back to late December. Shit is going to be bananas at work and getting a grad school app ready, so it is nice to have the extra time (although admittedly, this project has been very slow to gain momentum).

    The flower project is going well but will require some real work this weekend making a final decision about the actuators. Either they’re going to be embedded in each petal, which may diminish mobility, or they’re going to be somewhere else and I’ll use monofilament to transfer motion. Using monofilament would be a bit of a defeat, though, since it really obviates the need for muscle wire - I could do it with servos.

    Excitingly, there’s a new (and hopefully easy) project that might prove more immediately rewarding—there was a call at the last Dorkbot meeting for an interactive audio exhibit for the kids to enjoy during the opening reception. I’m going to make a small patch of flowers that react to presence and produce (hopefully spooky) sounds. More on that soon.

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