Leaf Bot Video Here

Just broccoli, cauliflower for outside and another tomato plant for the WindowFarm for now…

Cut an extension cord and split it to two bulb sockets with 100 watt 5500k CFLs.

UPDATE: Upon further consideration…there’s nothing wrong with Cinder. It’s just not telling me what exactly is the problem with my code.

here…have some errors:

Build FFT of project FFT with configuration Debug

/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1/stdexcept:47: error: expected declaration before end of line

If anyone has ideas, lemme know. I’m pretty much at a complete impasse.

Cut and paste your way to open-source VJ goodness.

Download pd here

Download the package here

See a short documentary video here

And email me if something isn’t working please please please here: yud dot sofy at gmail dot com

Way back during orientation week, a few of us were talking about music, as you do when you’re just getting to know a new group of people. Specifically, Marko Manriquez and I shared our enthusiasm for Aphex Twin. We talked about the incredible variation and detail that shows up in the drum programming in pieces such as Girl/Boy Song and wondered whether such intricately constructed music could possibly have just been made by hand or whether some kind of algorithm helped out.

I speculated that you could accomplish something like that style of non-repeating linear invention by using probability. You would just declare a set of allowed pitches and metric values to be assigned to each instrument and then allow the computer to randomly choose between those over-and-over to compose the piece. That would allow you to shape the aesthetics of the output without having to go in and make all the tiny micro decisions required to through-compose something with as much mind-boggling detail as the drums in Girl/Boy Song. (For the record, I don’t believe that this is actually how Aphex Twin works; I think he actually writes all of that stuff by hand.)

Having had this idea, I sat down during the Tisch Convocation and wrote Whoops, a Ruby library that uses probability to generate scores for bloopsaphone, _why the lucky stiff’s 8-bit music generator. Bloopsaphone uses a very simple text-based score system where, for exaple, “4C” would mean “play a quarter note on C”, etc., which made it very easy to implement this idea in an environment where I could get instant feedback in the form of listenable music.

This was all back in late August of last year. I haven’t touched Whoops since.

So, yesterday, for 4-in-4 I decided to actually use Whoops to create a piece of music. I started by defining a bunch of bloopsaphone sounds: hi-hat, snare, bass drum, lead melody, and bass. Next, I started using Whoops to define what I wanted the drums to do.

If you look at lines 53-57 of that ruby script, you can see the Whoops commands that generated the drums. I’m always having them play C since they’re a percussive instrument anyway and their pitch doesn’t matter. For the bass drum and hi-hat, I mostly want quarter notes (this is Aphex-inspired IDM, after all) so I give “4″ as the most common value in the duration array. I want the snare to feel like it’s largely on the 2 and 4 so I mostly give it half notes in its duration array. And then, I added one more sequence for the hi-hat, “hat_detail”, that plays spastically on small duration increments (16,32, and even 18 and 9 for 16th and 8th note triplets). I gave that sequence mostly rests (the empty string) as its pitches so that it would only play occasionally; I wanted it to be decorative, not totally take over.

Once I had the drums starting to sound how I wanted, I figured out a chord progression for the melody and bass to follow and wrote down sets of notes that they should be playing for each chord. Then, I followed the bloopsaphone API to play the resulting music and also made sure that my script would spit out the actual notes generated for each instrument. That way, each time I ran the script, I’d get a different musical result and if I liked one, I could copy and paste the score for it so I could reproduce it and even modify and improve it if I wanted to.

After lots of runs, I had a few versions of things that I liked. The melody was the weakest. Some runs would have bits of compelling melody in the patterns that happened to come out but it was rare also not to have bits of weird dissonance or just melodic incoherence. So, I went in and edited the melodies I liked best to tweak them into a more compelling shape through classic melodic rules such as repeating patterns that were already there or adding sequence and series. The results sounded like this, for example: whoops_demo_2.mp3.

Here’s the score for that fragment:

Once I had a couple of bits that I liked, I outputted the instruments one at a time to AIFFs using Soundflower and GarageBand and then brought the resulting files into Logic to mix. I was surprised at how easy and fun it was to mix these 8-bit sounds. I wasn’t sure how well they’d take reverb, compression, and the other normal tools of music mixing, but I ended up pretty happy with the sounds that I got.

I didn’t have time to put together a long-scale composition, but I did finish a sketch for a song. I’m calling it “And He Built A Crooked House”. Listen to it here: And He Built A Crooked House.

Here’s two recordings I made.

The Books – Be Good To Them Always
Bjork – Hyperballad

I wanted to know more about Sproutcore, the open source framework that allows you to create native style applications on the web.  There’s not much for me to mention. I mainly was running through the tutorial.  It was great fun and I got to use the Terminal alot which always denotes a feeling of authenticity.

Difficulties

The main issue was learning about bash inputs.  There was a string of code that read:

export PATH=`pwd`/abbot/bin:$PATH

I assumed I was supposed to just type that in.  That doesn’t work.  I learned that some computers have .bashrc

I don’t have that either.  But I do have a .bashprofile and that’s where I needed to add the export path.  After that, it was simply a matter of going in Terminal, typing up to the directory I plan on working on and running sc-server.  Good times!

I spent last night drawing up a Beam & Crank linkage in Vectorworks from Marks’ Mechanical Engineers’ Handbook:

That part didn’t take too long, so then I drew it through 15 stages of rotation, assuming 15 frames per second of animation–so 360° ÷ 15 = 24°.  So far, pretty easy, but then I printed the images as PDF’s and imported them into iMovie HD.  Definitely not the way to go.  I ended up with a pretty crude bit-mapped animation:

I tried PNG’s, and the line work was better, but I had the setting wrong for maintaining the canvas size, so every frame had a different proportion.  This effect might come in handy some time, but not here:

I then realized that I needed vector-based animation. Duh. Flash. I knew I would need to learn it or something like it sooner or later. No time like the present. I don’t have it installed, but I figured out how to export the Vectorworks files as a .DWG into Illustrator (each layer can also be copied and pasted), and then exported as a Flash movie:

Beam & Crank linkage, “as used on side-wheel steamers.”

To follow up on this, I plan to do the same with:

• Drag-Link Mechanism
• Rocker Mechanism
• Sliding-Block Linkage
• Swinging-Block Linkage
• Turning-Block Linkage

difficult

thin lips and eyes
to wind –
through marriage of wine
dancing moments
and kiss from hot wings

smooth like a fire
like a
stolen hag
belly rotten green and gray
and a wind passes through the centre


next to me sits heaven.
next to me sits hell.

confusion and dialect
run rampant discourse
through the ides
of my mind.
rythm beats time
through glass eyes,
the rind of a misbegot soul.

two secrets,
twp secrets and falling.

inner peace and outer beauty
out of the rabbit
hole of hopes and dreams and fears and farts and
tiny little men
that doze inside of my head.

envision the world for me
a bucket of ice that hits your sides
that being called shame
the frightful foe.

that that that
that that

and then the words won’t come out
 anymore.

this flock of signs that
rule the world
and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet,
you notice, you know, that there is
all but the fiercest moment
when you decide,
trusting instinct.
the world will follow.

imagine a man
perhaps his top hat
double suit
new shining-ish dandy

imagine a woman
beauty thorough
with teeth of gold
and silver and black
smiling to cure the .

wait.
wait.
 wait.

why cure?
why heal?
why forgive – finesse the sin?
this is the falacy of the world.
pull yourself to the centre.

in the center you will find the rythm.

the only goal of love is to kill
the broken blister
doubt and brown baguette.
a red tailed magic and fine boned teeth
align a wall of brown
and pale cream skin.

let not the eye which spawns the food
spring forth from the foreheads of demons.

there exists a truth.

music is sunlight
sunlight is rythm
sound from light and light from sound
the sound vibrates my body.
the light vibrates my soul.

and uns
turns into sun.

together and one
the warm place together.
open the big green door.
magic flute and play
me the song.
show me the light of the moon, oh m
an  oh man of six arms.

A photocell (or ideally an IR sensor, which I could not obtain on short notice) attached to the ceiling inside your apartment, several feet from your front door, recognizes a change in light. This means that your roommate is inside your apartment and is either on his/her way out or his/her way in. The second piece is below.

This simple digital switch is made of scrap metal. One piece is attached to the door and the other to the threshold. When the door is closed the switch is on, and when the door is open the switch is off. If the photocell reading occurs before the switch opens, your roommate has left the apartment. If the switch opens before the photocell reading, your roommate has arrived. In each case you will be notified by either SMS/phone/email.

Here are photos of the breadboard and a bird’s eye view of the entire uninstalled device. The device is missing an XPort to connect this to the Internet. Luckily I have the code for this, so I plan to wrap this up next week after 5in5 is over.

So, I’m a bit late in posting, and I have to apologize for that. Unfortunately, at around four in the morning last night, I realized that my second 5-in-5 project was getting completely out of hand, possibly better suited for a weeks worth of experimentation and building then a day. I may try and simplify and rebuild for Friday, we’ll see.

Anyway, yesterday morning/afternoon I had another project to deal with, location scouting. I’m lucky enough to have a small installation in the Art Under the Bridge Festival in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Brooklyn, and yesterday the folks at the DUMBO Arts Commission asked me to come down and meet with them. I’m incredibly excited to be a part of this, and pretty nervous at the same time. I’m calling the project “Stories from Things Left Behind,” an extension of one of the very first p-comp project I ever worked on (“Trash Talk” with Dave Overholt and EJ Park).

“Stories From Things Left Behind” is about a series of discarded objects: a shipping crate, a few kids’ lunch boxes, a briefcase, a steamer trunk, and a record case, all abandoned in a trash heap. The objects themselves will be outfitted with carefully hidden Arduinos, motors, speakers, and small LED lighting systems, enabling them the tell their “stories”. Inside the briefcase, for instance, it will sound as though a tiny board meeting is taking place, inside the lunch boxes, the sounds of kids laughing, the record crate, a 70′s disco party, etc. The objects, rejected and discarded, are understandably bitter; though they are more then happy to talk to one another, when a person comes to close (within 5-6 feet) they immediately clam up and shut their lids.

In order to make this all work, choosing the proper location is important. I need somewhere visible, yet slightly out of the way, so as to make the discovery of these pieces a surprise. The festival goes on for three days, and a lot of it is outside, meaning that dealing with rain is always a possibility. In order to determine when someone has wandered into the scene, I’ll be using ultra-sonic proximity sensors, which don’t do well in crowded spaces. Also, in order to use as few of these sensors as possible (I’m hoping to get away with just two for the whole thing), I need the space to be in a corner of sorts, so I can position the beams properly. All in all this is quite a bit to consider.

The DAC does an amazing job of working with local property management companies, business, and the city to allow artists to put their work in a variety of sites in the DUMBO area. This is amazingly accommodating, even maybe a little too much; I expected to be given just a few options, to make a quick decision, and then to be on my way. Instead, I spent six hours wandering around DUMBO, taking some snapshots, and weighing options.

Here are some of the spots I’m considering. I know that they look like nothing now, but come Sept. 26^th, with a lot of luck, I should have everything up and running.

All in all, this wasn’t really how I planned on spending my day (my living room is covered in red fabric as a testament to this), but this was a project in and of itself, and I’m glad I got it done.

Dennis Crowley and I spent all day doing 5 different Olympic Events: 100m freestyle, 100m dash, 110m hurdles, long jump and the rings (in gymnastics) and compared ourselves to Olympic athletes. This was to see just how amazing these athletes are in comparison to average Joes and as an excuse to do Olympic events all day. Since we only had one day to do all five events, with the famous Robert Moon video taping us and edit all the footage together it could have been done a bit better but we are happy with the outcome.

(Previously, I made some grammatical errors, thank so much for bringing them to my attention. The 24 hour time constraint, along with 5 Olympic Events then editing it all together seemed to effect my writing skills.)

FYI:
100 meter Freestyle:
Christian’s Time = 1:18:10
Dennis = DQ for touching bottom of pool, thats illegal
But his time was: 1:56:30
Olympic Winner = 47:52

Long Jump
Christian = 14.1 Feet (4.3 meters)
Dennis = 13.7 Feet (4.17 meters)
Olympian = 8.95 meters

Video

Bonus Footage