getsu chompu

trying to integrate my interests in art, music, and education into learning how to code - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - @YutakaHoulette yutakahoulette.com

[historybizarre]

[getsuchompu]

Shows how sound can be a powerful but minimal way to virtually evoke a specific space.

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Another loop made by overlaying tracks with multiple time signatures.  I started with 5 measures of 7/4 then added 7 measures of 5/4.  35 isn't a very divisible number so the weird melody part had to be lopped into a 16 beat measure and and 19 beat measure... 

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Had a great time putting together this video of a water-pressure powered plastic bottle rocket's POV of getting launched 40+ feet above a school yard before pummeling back down to earth.  Very surprised that the GoPro and its case remained unscathed!  This is probably the last teaching related thing that I will do before jumping into General Assembly's Web Development Immersive program for the next three months.

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About a month ago, I got lucky and was able to be part of Rhys Chatham's 100 piece electric guitar orchestra, performing his six movement piece titled A Secret Rose.  The piece was super dynamic, ranging from tightly synchronized staccatos to walls of harmonic noise.  One of my favorite pieces had different sections performing in difference time signatures at the same time - one would play in 4/4, one in 5/4 and one in 9/4 and so on.  The parts played off of each other in a way that was catchy but at the same time, hard wrap my head around.  It was mesmerizing, like watching planets on their various orbits going around a star.  Sometimes, they would align, and this would create an unexpected accent.  Apart from having a great time and meeting some amazing fellow guitarists, being a part of this piece made me want to explore this method of creating loops in multiple time signatures.

I think that a web application that visualizes these loops as spinning discs of some sort, could be an interesting way to push the way music and especially loops are thought about.  This is another project that I hope to be able to create in the not too distant future....  

This soundcloud sketch has as a base, a loop that overlays  5/4, 3/4 and 4/4 measures.  Hoping to mine this method more soon. 

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A few years ago, my good friend Heidi Gustafson asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a visual project that involved symbols and chance.  The basic idea was to create a way to randomly select three symbols to be synthesized into new concepts.  We called the project Mixtum.  Figuring out how to physically create Mixtum required a lot of prototyping and testing, but eventually we were able to create an edition of 100 letter-pressed, functional boards that we were really happy with.  Because Mixtum is such an open-ended tool, it’s been used in many disciplines, like art, music, cooking, dance, writing and divination.  We've even been able to present and play it at the American Visionary Art Museum, University of Maryland STAMP Gallery, at summer art classes at the Smithsonian Institute, among other places.  

Eventually, I hope to be able to build a web application that would mimic the functionality and feel of the physical game, but until then I’ll have to be content with this text-only version that I put together: 

http://repl.it/Mzh/2

Can’t wait until I can use Ruby to work with IMAGES.

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I recently put together this poster for Zetta Tech Science, a Bay Area science and art program for kids (the text for specific classes will be hand written on the bottom left portion of the poster).  I've been doing freelance work for them for a while, from creating their logo and website, to shooting and editing video and even teaching some classes.  It's really exciting to see what kids come up with when they are given a structured but open ended environment.  My favorite instance of this was when a group of kids who were given solar powered motors and gears and instructions on how to make a vehicle, decided instead to make a solar powered loom using thread from one of their frayed socks.

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Instrument-a-day 7: Speak and Play!

I love how Ranjit Bhatnagar synthesizes playfulness, kind of a dead-pan humor and smart programming in his various projects.  Super inspiring.  

Speak and Play! is a speech synthesizer for pianists. It has two parts: a score generator that turns written English text into musical scores, and a sample set (hurriedly constructed from my own voice) which, when used to play the scores, approximately recreates the original text. Thanks to pianist Margaret Leng Tan for making Speak and Play! speak and play, and for coming up with the name! More details at www.moonmilk.com/2012/02/08/instrument-a-day-7-speak-and-...

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I am really enjoying reading James Gleick’s The Information, an ambitious history of information that spotlights and connects various practices and breakthroughs in the development and transmission of information.  Gleick starts the book with a fascinating explanation of why drummers in Sub-Saharan Africa would beat out complicated rhythms when their rhythmic packets of information often contained relatively simple messages.  By the end of the book he is in the terrain of Google, and a lot of ground is covered in between.   There are many fascinating characters in the book, but for me, one of the most intriguing is Augusta Ada Byron King, aka Ada Lovelace.  She was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, and as a preemptive measure against any madness that Ada might have inherited from her poet father, her mother encouraged her daughter to study mathematics.  She also played the harp.  But her claim to fame came from assisting Charles Babbage in the creation and promotion of his analytic engine - a steam powered, general purpose computing machine.  She is said to have written the first algorithm for the analytic engine, making her arguably the first computer programmer.  Although it seems that Babbage’s intention for the machine was mainly to do high-level math, Ada had poetic and visionary ideas about the potential of the machine, which I find inspiring: "Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent… We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves." I wonder what she would have thought of future visionary, musical programmers like Laurie Spiegel.

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A Google image search of "choose your own adventure" displays a plethora of book covers that instantly brought back memories of my third grade library.  These books were very popular among me and my fellow classmates, and we consumed them like potato chips.  But I remember that the intense cover illustrations often felt like the best parts of the book - the stories within often felt formulaic and trying to find the correct path to the ending of the story often felt like a mechanical chore.  Maybe writing so many potential plot paths inevitably make a story diffuse?  Whatever the case, I still really like the idea of this type of interactive reading (although when you are reading, you're constantly making predictions and connections, which to me, seems sufficiently interactive) and am glad that the books were printed and that we are left with all of this cool cover art.

Having thought about all of this, I was still excited to create my own CYOA story as part of Zed Shaw's LRtHW book (am on chapter #39 as I write this) as it presented a fun coding and writing challenge.  The story (if you can call it that),called Deviled Pig's Feet is a short, surreal adventure set near the Black Forest of Germany.  I must have gotten the idea for the story from being in close proximity to my wife's German cookbook (was working at the kitchen table).  You can read/play the story here: http://repl.it/Ml5

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In working my way through Zed Shaw's "Learning Ruby the Hard Way", I've been trying to keep in mind my own teaching philosophy from when I used to teach full time: try to make learning relevant and fun for the student (in this case, that would be me!).  

For the exercise on prompting and passing, (#14), I tried to tap into my interest in experimental, chance-based writing and art techniques like Burroughs' cut-ups or Cage's use of the I Ching.  I was able to use what I learned in the exercise to create a more straightforward and probably more familiar, surreal writing game: madlibs!  Once I have a better grasp on how to use Ruby's randomizing capabilities on strings and figure out how to style (if that's even the right term) the Ruby output, I'd like to try to create some more sophisticated writing tools/games...     

The text that I used for the madlib was from a news clip about the difficulties of logging onto the various affordable care act websites.  

You can view the code at the link here: http://repl.it/LfJ/2.  Press the play button to give it a try.  My favorite result so far is:

About 8.6 million chickens visited the invisible website in the first week, running into software orbs and egalitarian waits that prevented them, in many cases, from even shivering to check out asparagus offerings. At one point, Phillip Glass posted error sand dollars in at least 24 states. Meanwhile, soothing, state-run exchange websites have swam far fewer problems.