MTF – Sem2, Week 6: Physical Computing 1

Got some strange results. Not sure if these are the noises I was to expect! Regardless, hours of frustrating fun.

Exercises 1 and 2 went reasonably. Exercise 3 was where I got elbow deep in a MIDI quagmire. Ex3 Stage1 –visually fine, no noise. Much later I achieved the desired effect with this setup.

1/ HORUS Output set to my audio interface and keyboard MIDI 1 (DSP24-1 for my setup).
2/ Set pin 0 controller # to 1 (modulation wheel)
3/ MIDI channel set to 10 (which is actually 9 on my keyboard, took a while to figure).
4/ Cubase: created MIDI track with same settings as above and recorded one long note.

A matter of fluking things in the right order/combination. Strange things continued to happen throughout this week's exercises, though. When I changed a controller number while the note was playing, it stopped sound. Still playing in Cubase, but no audio. Also, random 'note on' messages occured. Stop sequence and hit reset MIDI and notes still sounding, but not notes from sequence! They just occurred. Weird. Solution to both problems? Shut down and start again.

And just a tip before you watch the video below; I have included Ex3 Stage2, but watching the footage back, you can't hear much HORUS effect happening and I'm not sure that there is. There was before the take, but as I say, tweaking things causes unexpected results (for now). I feel the change should have been more obvious, very subtle. Maybe try changing controller #'s. Pin 0 with the potentiometer shows no movement in the HORUS graph and the LDR showed minimal change from flat out, even with my finger right on it.

My thoughts fly to interior and interaction design. Being able to program the Arduino board and then take it away from the computer opens many doors. Thinking voice activation; any note between Bb and D opens the curtains, movement sensors for lights, music. A high-tech 12 volt Arduino house centred around your 12 note MIDI controller! Mobile multi-media installations would be a breeze (well, not quite, but glance back 20, even 10 years).

References:

Haines, Christian. "Physical Computing." Music Technology Forum. September 30, 2007. University of South Australia, South Australia.

http://tigoe.net/pcomp/index.shtml . Accessed 4th September, 2007. Good resource.

http://itp.nyu.edu/~dbo3/physical/physical.html. Accessed 4th September, 2007. Amazon's sampler. Not the whole book but gives you a look inside and good resource.

* Thanks to Christian for his help with this and especially to Seb for the emails re: Ex3 *