Here I am showing a few instruments, or modes, overlayed. Most instruments are designed to simply make sound when I interact, but others are self generative (like the bouncing balls) so that aspect of them persists between modes. I haven't really payed much attention to musical key or the 'edges' of the sounds, so its a bit of a cacophony I'm afraid, but I wanted to play with it again and thought i may as well blog it. Each time I do this I go away and make improvements, so perhaps itll be better next time! I really must work out how to switch of auto focus on my camera tho!
So I have written a few 'instruments' but this one is a nice basic one we were hoping to play on stage some time soon. It has basic x-y control for reverb and filter, but also distance between primary and secondary touch is delay length and angle between the 2 touches is delay wetness.
We had it ready and set up to play at last weeks Digital City party. But WOE! however much testing and prep you do before-hand something has to come along and take a long hot piss on your metaphorical bonfire. This time it was in the form of a bizarre midi glitch that knocked out Andys PC. Not even the PC thats running it! So, in order to do the show we had to ditch the new toy and play. And what a gig it was....sweet, sweet Digital City. GOOD party.
Again we tried for Peepshow, having debugged the problem. Against all odds, having to share a somewhat cramped stage with Hextatic and Jon Hopkins, we managed to get it working again, and despite having Jon in the line of sight of the projector we even got it calibrated and ready to go. Then another weird bug, this time with the CCV/camera driver software. CRASH! so we had to forget about it again. We are edging closer and closer but still the cigar has not been presented to me, or even purchased in preparation. I looked jealously at Jons rugged, and effective triple Kaoss pad setup and wondered if there was any point.
Any more name ideas? So far we have...
Virgil
ITCH
CLIVE
Lumiphone
Lumiphonica
and Lamp-a-tron
I have been keeping an eye on the multitouch community over the last year or so...a bunch of tech heads, with carpentary skills, building rather nice coffee tables with touch screens in. If you have ever seen a Microsoft Surface, thats the thing that these guys are making at a fraction of the £14,000 price tag.
A few people build walls, and this is what I have been interested in. Some people are building walls to play with sound. And some people are doing it jaw droppingly well, like SubCycle (http://www.subcycle.org/).
It is clear to me that Christian Bannister there is a producer who has been comprehensively beaten to within an inch of his life with the talent stick, not to mention his Einstein like noggin-power. I know just enough about this sort of thing to know that with time and a little budget, I could have a crack at something similar.
The ultimate aim is not for something quite like Subcycle. For a start, I just can't see us getting something THAT good. Secondly, our music is different and will require different instruments, and lastly I really want to explore the idea of having the graphics (and physics) themselves generate sound and control it, not necesarily needing your touch, your intercation would just 'stir' it.
Shatterproof vidThis is one of the most pointless excercises in creative nerdery, I think, that I have ever undertaken. Why? Because I can. Basically, this is a video made up of text letters, like the very old-skool ascii print-outs you could get of your face on white and green tractor feed printer paper...except moving.
It features me mouthing the words that I did eventually want to have done by a pretty girl. But the process of converting video into thousands of frames of text characters was so gruelling, I didn't want to re-do it once the proof of concept worked. I started this project last June. It still aint really finished to the standard I'd like. But I really do have better things to do. Peace. Dom Echaskech.
