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Recently I started drawing again and made this for Ren’s collaborative International Women’s Day zine. The zine packs 56 or so pages of awesome art, poetry and writings that range from lighthearted fun to stuff that made my gut wrench in how heavy it was. Trigger warnings all round - you can get it here.

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Caffeine by Mathieu St-Pierre

Mathieu St-Pierre, 2012

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‘Die For Your Love’ by ATOMIC LEAGUE is my new jam.

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‘This’ by Modeselektor feat. Thom Yorke is my new jam.

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‘Judge Jury and Executioner’ by Atoms for Peace is my new jam.

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‘Ode To The Summer (Radio Edit)’ by Syd Arthur

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MIDI triggering systems and "everything is already invented" frustration

I'm thinking of ideas for some simple project to trigger MIDI in an unusual way and so far it's been frustrating - everything cool that I thought of already exists! I googled the hell out of the internet and even with the most obscure ideas there is someone who's done it already. And most of those ideas are patented. Ugh. On the other hand I found so many cool MIDI triggering systems that I thought I should do a short summary so I could reference it later. So here it goes.

1. MIDI guitar. Uber awesome beyond belief:

http://www.gizmag.com/laser-system-detects-guitar-string-pitch/19278/

The creators of the technology believe that this system will be built into most guitars by default after several tens of years. From what I've seen and read so far (and if it's as good as it is described) I fully believe that too. I tried finding some information on how it actually works and found some leads here:

http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/eopd-sensor/eopd-how-to-measure-distance/

I still can't wrap my head around how the EOPD's aren't affected by ambient light but I think it might have something to do with light polarization:

http://plc.cwru.edu/tutorial/enhanced/files/lc/light/light.htm

Also, besides making guitars into fast MIDI controllers this new system makes quite a nice light show.

2. MIDI shoes. There is a whole summary of different types and different uses of MIDI triggering from shoes in this post:

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2009/07/29/the-complete-guide-to-midi-shoes/

The BeatShoes from the above post even have their own Instructables page so anyone some little knowledge of electronics and programming can build them:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Musical-MIDI-Shoes/

For an even more intense food for thought I am imagining a whole ballet equipped with these...

3. Midisticks. These are drumsticks that produce different sound according to what material they are played on and even varying amplitude according to the strength of impact. Basically electronic drums without the drum parts... They are impressive and I'm trying to think of how they actually work - how the hell do they differentiate the materials they are being played on? If it's conductivity some materials with static electricity would fry them. But maybe it's not. Could be the elasticity (bounciness) of the materials. Actually I have no idea and don't want to speculate and embarrass myself further.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/midisticks

http://www.midisticks.ltd.uk/Video.htm

4. MIDI laser harp. Quite easy to build one actually - just need some lasers and photo resistors and a controller or something. This example is the most profesh-looking one and has even won some awards:

http://www.laser-harp.com/

Makezine has a good tutorial on how to make this epic beast:

http://blog.makezine.com/projects/laser-harp/

5. And finally - MIDI wall. Yes, a MIDI wall. Yes. Wall:

http://highlyliquid.com/hl2012/blog/478

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Me and my friends Adventure Time style!

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simple synth

This university project is a simple two-oscillator sound synthesizer that uses 3 different sound synthesis types that determine the interaction between them – additive synthesis, amplitude modulation and frequency modulation. I have made it as a standalone application with a GUI to control the parameters (waveforms, frequencies and type of synthesis) that can be changed in real-time. My application is written in C++ using OpenFrameworks (for the core of the application and the GUI) and Maximilian library (for sound synthesis). The two oscillators are independent from one another and can have one of the 5 types of waveforms each (sine, cosine, square, sawtooth and triangle). Even though I am happy with the result, especially the GUI and smooth real-time interaction, the sound part of the app needs many improvements. First of all, I found it very hard to determine the ranges of the modulating wave so there would be good variations of sound in AM and FM. Another thing that I came across is clipping and unexpected noises. I still have to investigate how they are created. However this unplanned unpredictability can produce sonically interesting results. Another part of the application that I need to work on if I want it to become scalable is how I manage events – now I have a big decision tree in the audioOut() method that plays back sound and it might produce latency if I’ll add more oscillators and effects.

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A silly art/physical computing project that me and my friend Alex did for uni. Morphophone is a sound box, controlled by arduino and Max MSP. All the sounds produced by the Morphophone are completely analog - we have drill sounding computer fan, two PVC recoders that can produce a range of frequencies of hiss and a motor that drives gears that make up a percussion system. All of the analog sound systems are designed and implemented by us out of mostly scrap materials - we had to improvise a lot to make it work with the things that can be found in most homes because our budget was for this was very very tiny. But we made it work more or less!

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Norway

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This project is an intent to represent qualities of an image as a terrain where the height of the relief is determined by the brightness of a pixel and the color of the shape at that point is the actual color of the pixel. This looks amazing so far but still need some work done. One thing I'm looking forward to implementing is some sort of interactivity with the structure - now there is only camera movement so the structure can be viewed from different angles.

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homework in progress.

Also, I think the ones that are going to appreciate this app the most are going to be people on acid...

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So I'm posting some pictures of fire. Yes I am.

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work in progress.

I don't know why but I recently started making so many things that hurt the eyes.