Over the weekend I finally finished the enclosure for my recently built Arduinome. This one uses the 8×8 PCB designed by Bibo on the Monome Forums and shines ultrabright blue LEDS. I was lucky enough to get a top & bottom faceplate kit made by XNDR from Machine Collective (before an apparent hiatus, xndr come back!) but never finished up enclosing the sides… until now!
I’ll keep this one short and simple and let the pictures do the talking. More media soon…
Ladies and gentleman… its happened! We spent 3 weeks in the studio between the hours of 12am – 5am, making a new live set to make you sweat. The goal was the “Experiential Differential” show at Watusi Bar in Wellington, which we promised would bring you the best is bass. The show went off great, and we had an amazing time dropping 30 minutes of brand new tracks for everyone that made it out. Proper shoutouts to Dunk, Excelle, Matty J, Jellyman and Rowzy– you guys all played great sets!
While the show unfortunately went unrecorded, we just finished recording a live performance of the set in the studio tonight and have put it online for your listening pleasures. Enjoy!
Bandcamp – listen / download the entire set
AhText Multi- Touch Installation from FlipMu on Vimeo.
As mentioned in our previous post about AhText, we recently collaborated with Jim Murphy, Dimitri Diakopoulos, and Ajay Kapur on an installation for David Rosenboom and Martine Bellens, calledAh! Opera-No-Opera (Hyperlinks baby!). Ah! premiered at RedCat Theatre in Los Angeles, September 16th – 18th, 2009, and our team was in charge of creating a multi-touch installation that would allow attendees to interactively navigate the 13 interconnecting stories and texts of the opera. The final application came very close to realizing the initial ideas we presented in the previous post. Over the course of working on the application we learned a great deal, moving from Processing to Eclipse / Java 1.5 (see this post), and coming up with interesting solutions which would enable multiple users to effectively navigate the stories through a multi layered menu system.
Working on this application was especially enlightening in that we came across many difficulties rendering text with the JAVA2D rendering engine in Processing. To address this, we used off-screen rendering in the P2D engine whenever we were required to render large amounts of text to the screen. Additionally, we still needed to use Java2D as it handles anti-aliased shapes much more elegantly than the P2D engine.
This project also allowed us to explore more complex state based design patterns, and afforded us the opportunity to create a simple and highly reusable mouse and TUIO enabled event library. We also implemented subject / listener patterns making it possible to dynamically add and remove touchable “zones”, buttons…etc at runtime.
multi-touch the storm – interactive sound visuals – subcycle labs from christian bannister on Vimeo.
Sometimes you come across something that really blows you away… today was one of those days! We are super excited about the work being done by Christian Bannister , a.k.a SubCycle Labs
Radio New Zealand interview
Radio New Zealand recently did a broadcast focusing on the robotics work of our adviser, and good friend, Dr. Ajay Kapur. We were lucky enough to have them ask us a few questions about our work with the multi-touch table, and what we are up to here in New Zealand. You can find the whole story here.
Menu from AhText
As we started the AhText Project, we began to run into our first difficulties with processing. It turns out that although Processing 0136+ supports Java 1.5, it does not support any of the new Java syntax. Things like generics, and enhanced “for” loops are not understood by the preprocessor and compiler used in Processing. See this link for more information.
We have been asked to create a new multi-touch application for the Opera Ah!, created by composer-performer David Rosenboom and poet-writer Martine Bellen, and which will be performed at RedCat September 15-17th. The Opera will also be featuring the work of our friends Meason Wiley, Jim Murphy, Dimitri Diakopoulos, and Dr. Ajay Kapur from CalArt’s MTIID program. They will be building Ten Hemisphere speakers (see Plork or Slork ), an MLGI laser controller, and flying robotic drums. The opera will also use live video feed from the lobby as source material for four projections onto the floor of the performance space.
On the other side of the world
Recently, Jordan and I both had the unique opportunity presented to us to pursue our PhD’s at the New Zealand School of Music Victoria University in Wellington. The program not only allows us to continue with our current work, but also continue working with Ajay Kapur, as well as Michael Norris and Dugal McKinnon.
We look forward to working with students, making new friends, and exploring new ideas about interactive design and sound. Additionally, the close proximity to both the engineering and computer science schools will hopefully produce some interesting collaborations, and allow Jordan and I to expand our technical skills.
This past June, Owen and I prepared our bodies for our upcoming travel to New Zealand by first flying to Europe. There were three destinations, Berlin, Paris and the Netherlands. While the latter two were more in the vain of seeing old friends and catching up over a couple beers, Berlin (though there was time for play too!) included the Berlin Open 2009 conference as well as a presentation at the Technical University of Berlin.
So, folks! Here it is, our long overdue thanks to everyone we met in Berlin. Firstly, we’d like to thank Bernd, Nikita, Ben, Ani and the rest of the Berlin-Open organizers, for inviting us to present our work. We’d also like to thank Wilm and friends at TU Berlin, we hope you have a touchable up and running and are excited to see where you might take it in regards to wavefield synthesis. Last but certainly not least, Jasmine, Mike and Erin, THANK YOU for giving us beds to sleep on, food to eat, and amazing memories to hold onto.
Berlin Open – Knowledge, Networking, Innovation
“The primary target is to convey the innovation potential of open policies and strategies – totally independent of the areas of expertise. To communicate examples where Openness is a fundamental alternative to traditional approaches…” (Berlin-open.org)
We presented on the open nature of much our work, and discussed exciting open technologies, philosophies and techniques being harnessed by music and multimedia engineering communities worldwide– many of which drive and inspire the work we do here at FlipMu. It was wonderful to hear conversation on the idea of “openness” from leading practitioners across multiple disciplines.
Main Berlin-Open Hall
Click to download Counter.ens
So I hope to start a series of posts about using Reaktor core. Reaktor core is very powerful, but can be a little daunting at first. I was lucky enough to learn from Martijn Zwartjes while at CalArts, and I’m going to try my best to show some of the things were key to helping me understand core a little better. In this post I’m going to build a counter. Nothing fancy, just nuts and bolts.
Core Audio Cell
To start we need to create an empty “Audio core cell”. The reason we need an Audio cell instead of an Event cell, is that we need access to the Sample Rate Clock. Since the Sample clock only runs at Audio rate, it only works right in the Audio core cell. It is possible to select a Sample Rate Clock in an Event core cell, but it wont work the way we need.
