Archives for April 2021

April 9, 2021 by Bruce Leave a Comment

Reflection on the weekly performance

The construction of my now Max patch is, honestly speaking, not that complex. I decided to be the bass once again because I really love the effect of bass coming out of the sound system in 933. Here is my Max part (I didn’t include much complexities):

The sensor I chose was LDR, the light sensor. In the first place, I had intended to use something creative like the accelerometer and the atmospheric pressure sensor. The atmospheric pressure sensor looks like this:

However, the tricky part is that the accelerometer and the atmospheric pressure sensor I bought arrived on Thursday morning, which really didn’t leave me enough time to figure out these sensors. Therefore, I decided to use the LDR, which is one of the sensors that I am most familiar with.

Connecting Arduino to Max 8: (I found that only when I restart Max 8 after transferring the code to the Arduino, Max 8 will then start to receive code)

Connecting

In terms of the performance, I think we four really did a great job. Compared to previous performances, I can directly feel the different layers of the music. There were the bass, the first melody, the secondary melody, etc. We four sounded like, as Daniel mentioned, a family of music. The overall delivery and the integrality of the music are much better than before. However, there is always room for improvement. When reviewing the video recording of the performance, I found that the overall performance at around 20-30 seconds was a little bit chaotic. That place is where Eden and Jiany came in. In the next performance, we will pay more attention to everyone’s entrance and exit in the performance.

April 6, 2021 by Bruce Leave a Comment

SensorBoard

The SensorBoard is about sensors, but not only sensors.

When I was watching the first Vimeo video about the performance given by SSS, I was impressed most by Tanaka. In the whole band, he was the one person that was doing something catches my eyes. I can directly tell the male performer on his right was playing theremin (I know this instrument pretty well because it was one of my choices for the final project of interaction lab last semester) and the female performer on his left was using the ultrasonic sensor to alter the music, BUT Tanaka was indeed doing something new. I watched other videos and read the article and found out he was using the bioelectricity sensor to direct the electricity generated by muscle movements. However, The tricky thing is that even if I’ve already learned the theory of his instrument and the logic embedded in it, I can still feel something unique watching his performance. I watched his performance and read the interview again, paying much attention to his part, and then I found the key. Tanaka said at the end of the interview that “in our art form, there is a balance between logic and intuition.” This is the key. It is not his novel sensor and visual presence that impresses me, but the performing style. The logic part and intuition part coexist in an extremely harmonious way. When he is performing, I can get the feeling that he is not actually performing a certain instrument, but that he is actually performing himself. The outcome (music) is intuitive, and the delivery is logical. What makes him outstanding is that there is always a connection between the music and the delivery, that you can always feel that it is reasonable this kind of music is generated by this kind of gesture/posture.

Maybe I didn’t manage to well explain my thoughts here, but what I want to say is that it is crucial to keep a balance between the outcome and the delivery of a performance, which is also something important l learned from last semester’s interaction lab. I focused on exploring the connection between the virtual world and reality, that one person’s behavior caused something exactly corresponding to that behavior, to happen in the virtual world. In terms of music, I believe the logic is the same, that “in our art form, there is a balance between logic and intuition.”

April 6, 2021 by Bruce Leave a Comment

Reflections of the Weekly Performance

The logic embedded in my NIME is actually rather simple. Eden, Shireen, and I all decided to make something wearable. They turned their ideas into a shirt and a pair of gloves. However, I was actually a bit uncertain about what to make at that time. My initial design was to turn the NIME into a kind of outer skin, like the concept of cyborg. The idea was actually practical given the small PCB (, which also restricted me from making a bigger and more complex NIME last week.) in terms of assembling, I intended to tape everything together, which would make the whole thing look more like skin, and it did turn out to yield some desired effects.

Then it came to the actual making part of the NIME. Given the reason that few can the soldered onto the small PCB, I decided to mainly incorporate the pitch division technique and took some time to find the best combination that generates the best beats. The soldered PCB looks like this:

Then I thought this might look too simple, and came up with some ideas to alter the resistor’s value in order to change the pitch. Therefore, I made another board with LDR, potentiometers, and resistor ladder, allowing alligator clips to freely switch between different modes. The board is like this:

About the performance part, I think we did it quite well, (apart from the fact that Eden was actually muted throughout the performance). The biggest progress from previous weeks is that everyone started to care more about the general flow of the music and made some corresponding changes to the volume and frequencies. However, I think the biggest weakness learned from last week’s performance might be the fact that none of us had made ourselves a switch that can control our NIMEs, which made the beginning and ending (I had to turn off the PA mixer to stop the music) quite chaotic. The next performance will be better.