One by one, things are getting done.  This past week, I presented the Pusher/Puller as an architectural piece in Metaforms and as a performance at the NIME Show, both of which went extremely well.  On Monday, Metaforms was held as a nine-hour critique session where each class member had approximately 30-40 minutes to present, field questions, and respond to critique.  The panel (including Luke DuBois, Daniel Perlin, and Roland Snooks from Kokkugia) really got what I was going for with my design, and had some great suggestions for future developments.

Shortly after that, I had the pleasure of debuting the Pusher/Puller at Exit Art as part of the ITP NIME Show, which was an absolute blast.  The set went really well, and the show had some absolutely amazing performances.  Full set of photos here.

I’ll be posting more shortly, but meantime, reminder: THE ITP SHOW IS SUNDAY AND MONDAY!!!  If you read this blog you probably know already, but in case you don’t — come on by!

I went wandering around Mood Fabrics last week (it’s HUGE, btw), and attempted to find something that was stretchy, half-transparent, and whiteish in color.  What I found was a big sheet of rayon, which gives the overall form a definite shape while still hinting at the science going on underneath and allowing new forms and shapes as the sliders are pushed/pulled.

And in use:

Also, the inside has been solidified. A lot. It’s all perfboarded now, the sliders are stabilized, and the only wire coming out is the USB cable.

I mean, inside, it looks like this:

…but let’s ignore that for now.

Now, my attention turns to the patch again.

Check it.

The question remains, of course, if I have time (or, err, the need) to rip this apart and build a new pusher/puller before the NIME show — but it’s nice to know people have done it in the past at least.

• Start: the form sits on the stage, dim light visible through it.
• I walk up to it, examine it, and then finally poke it — this makes it jump to life.
  • And/or ultrasonic that turns it on when I get close enough.
• The object starts by playing a faint drum beat
  • The form also begins pulsing white light
• I look perplexed, but pull the speed slider up, and the full drum loop becomes audible.
• I pull out the reverb slide, and mess with that for a bit, showing the spatial relation between the shape and the sound made.
• I pull out the bit rate, pitch shifter, and lores filter sliders, and mess with them accordingly to mash up the sound.
• I tweak the delay slider for a bit to get some nice echoes.
• Then I mess with the buffer slider, making the sample choppy at first and then singing in pitch after a bit.
• Once it’s pitched, I can play that pitch by pushing the speed slider in or out. That’s one of the most appealing parts of this, so I’ll probably do that for a while.
• After having messed with it to my satisfaction (I did so for about 3:40 today and it was actually really interesting to listen back to: check it out — I probably wouldn’t take 3 minutes up live of just that), I push all the poles in at once (probably hitting a footswitch on the floor to actually make it happen or using rate control to see if things have been pushed in quickly), and the noise goes sputtering out.
  • When I do this, the lights flicker out accordingly and go back to their dim state.
• At this point, the loop I just finished is swirling about, and a second loop of beats is now inside the form.
  • Optional — I’d discussed in class having the mutilated loops “live” somewhere (Gideon suggested mason jars, which I quite like), especially as if they allow me to play them more later, but there’s only so much I can do in this performance.
• I repeat the above process, find what I want, and spew it out as well. This time I’d like to make it rhythmic (in time with the other one) but more ambient, more background, and maybe bass-frequency focused.
• These two loops are now bouncing off each other (and may be lightly augmented by a sampling patch, much like Lesley’s, so they don’t end up just making annoying noise).
• I repeat again, this time with a higher pitched sample, and out of it form a melody.
• I’m think I repeat that again with a second melody.
• End: I shrink the machine again, (close the jars if I’m using them), shrug, and walk offstage.

One big question I’m still working with is layering things on top of things. I really want to, but the tough part is balancing what I’ve messed with (and is playing on loop) and what I’m messing with (which will also be audible). The solution may be to have the sounds pre-picked and edited so they don’t need much tweaking beyond what is cool to demo and go from there.

There’s a few other things I’ve been toying with, like the idea of having the sounds be of architectural spaces instead of loops, and having video play of those spaces while they’re mangled, but honestly, while it’s high in concept I’m not sure it’s worth watching, really. I’ve played with that a bit, and it’s much closer to the architectural concept, but it’s a bit further from the rest.

I also thought about pulling the sides of the “tarp” up — left side to let audio in, right to let it out — but (A) that’s a little cheesy, and (B) that’s going to be a bit harder to regulate. We’ll see. It’d be fun to have to look around for other things to “shove” into the machine, but I’m not sure how that’d work live.

More on this… soon!

Oh, P.S. – the patch has evolved too. Looky!

As a performance, it’ll be a bit simpler — the object will serve as a controller for a Max patch which features seven adjustable arguments (delay, res filter, overdrive, buffer, sample speed, bit rate, pitch), and pushing/pulling the points will move slide-pots, which will feed the values into the these parameters. What I’d like to do (as I see it now) is have the sound of a city space slowly fill in, and then start messing with that sound. I’ve been playing with that a bit, and it’s really amazing how melodic and rhythmic you can get it to sound.

The materials, thankfully, seem to have worked themselves out. I’ve covered this a bit before, but to recap: the main cage is steel (an electrician’s junction box), with steel supports around the top and sides. The mechanical guts are mainly just slide-pots (later, motorized sliders) with brass rods epoxyed on, attached to perfboards, held in place by bolts and armature wire. Power, ground and value wires run out from each, and are soldered to perfboards which run to an Arduino Mini. The Mini’s analog pins read the sliders’ values, and then send that to Max, where those values control the patch’s parameters.

What I’ve not worked out much is how I’ll keep that from getting boring — something like this can ride on novelty for the first minute or two (”ooh, he overran the buffer and now it’s going ‘WHAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEE’ in pitch!”), but I’d like this to actually be an enjoyable, musical performance, so I’m working on how to make that happen without having a backing band or something. I like Lesley’s idea of having singers back up the performance, but I’m not sure that fits for me. I’d considered having another person play acoustic guitar to it, and see if I could actually accompany the guitarist by playing the city — we’ll have to see how cheesy that ends up being. There’s a lot of experimentation still to do.

I’ve posted a lot about how the actual prototype looks, but not about how it’d fit into a space. So in its current size, as an installation, it’d probably look a bit like this:

Played, in real size, would be like this (except with a cover over the form):

(Thanks to Nick Hasty for being my model in this shot.)

As noted above, the question is what sound goes in and how it’ll be played, and I’m still a bit indecisive on that. So far I’ve been using drum samples (loops, kicks, snares) and it’s been really amazing to see how you can get play with them, but it wouldn’t be a whole performance. I’d started thinking about putting arpeggiating tones on top of the sound of the city, and I’d like to mess with that a bit, but I’m not sure it fits anymore. So better, I think, is the sound of city spaces piled on top of each other, wooshing in and out, with me messing with the sounds to create the piece. We’ll see.

By Wednesday I’ll have a score worked out, so that should illustrate what I’m hoping to do (as well as give me a chance to mess around a bit more with the sounds) — more to come on that.

Same shape, from overhead:

Of course, the issue is that it’s way too tight now.  I tried the queen-sized (how offensive must THAT be, btw?) ones, and they’re so tight they end up pulling the poles in on each other, so that won’t work.  I’ll have to go find some material now that’s as stretchy as pantyhose (and just about as thick) but larger.

Also, I’m not sure I’d posted the latest in what the prototype looks like, so here’s that:

And from the side:

Until I have a chance to gut this and start all over again (read: probably not for a month or two), this shape will do nicely.  Now to just cover it properly.

It actually behaves better than most Behringer equipment I’ve messed with, and the motorized sliders react surprisingly well.  Of course, at this point, I’ll probably have to wait until after finals to take it apart and start building anew, but it’s nice to know it’s doable at least.

Back to the patch itself…

After taking a week to really rethink the way my prototype works, I started solidifying the innards a bit better.  I’d wanted to add motion, beef up the structure, possibly make it bigger, and do a while pile of other things, but realistically I’ll have to call it quits on building for now.  I took the bugger apart to solder the previously free-running wires down to perfboards (mostly just so they’d stop jumping out of place), heat shrunk the cables, and generally made it a bit sturdier.

Mini lil’ cut-up boards:

I’ve also now decided to shift my focus for Metaforms to this project, and the two are tying in quite well.  Dana had some fantastic feedback about design, shape and material choices, the latter of which is probably the foremost in my mind at the moment.  Today in class she suggested checking out ladies’ pantyhose as well, which I’ll do (and likely sketch out the clerk while I’m at it.  Again.).  I’ve also picked up a few books at Dana’s suggestions, including Iannis Xenakis’ Art-Science: Alloys and Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture.  Hopefully that’ll inform this whole process a bit better.

Also, had a great chat with Jamie yesterday about concept and the programming side of it all, which left me with a lot of good ideas.  I’m still tweaking/tinkering/mutillating the patch a bit, trying to clean it up, add more relevant controls/sounds, and shape it into more of a timeline/performance.  Here’s where that stands for now:

It’s clearly still a bit of a mess, but most activity is now kept in sub-patchers, so that’s cleaning it up.  Jamie had brilliant suggetsions for using mute~ to keep my CPU load down and rate detection to jump to new parts of the patch, both of which I’m now in the middle of implementing.  I’m also having issues getting a proper reverb working, but I’ve got TapTools installed now, and that should help a bit.

The next two big challenges are (A) for the performance, to get a proper performance plan/score done, and (B) for the form itself, finalize the external setup of the prototype.   Given that this is a short week, I’m hoping to have the whole thing back together by Thanksgiving and tweak the patch during the weekend.

- It needs to reference the inspiration of architecture more in the sound of things.  The sounds need to be more about space and shape, which I wholly agree with.

- Running with that, the actions need to be mapped better.  I.e., if it’s pulled left, pan left.  If pulled right, pan right.  Pull up the top, make it less compressed (or bigger via delay).
- Stretchy material needs to cover the frame so it really shows how the shape changes.

- Lots of people wanted to see it bigger, so that the actions were more obvious.  Not sure I can pull that off in time, but I do agree.

- Light each point (as in put LED’s at the end of each pole), maybe?  That way you can see what I’m pulling and what it’s doing back.

I was really stoked to get these (and a bunch of other) great ideas from the class, and am even more convinced I have to (A) get back to work on this thing and (B) continue it past the NIME show.  However, I took this week to work on the audio side a bit more and really step back and think a bit — I’ll be back to the building side this week/weekend.

What I’m also thinking about is creating this as an installation for later, which I see going thusly:

- The object is in the middle of a room.

- There are mics in each corner of the room.

- People don headphones and start to mangle the sound in real-time, changing their experience of the space.

That idea, clearly, is half-baked still — I’m not sure there’s any reason to do it, really, but I’m going to tinker around a bit more.  Much more to come, of course.

Part one:

And the second part of that video’s here.  About halfway into it, I tossed my shirt over the frame to give it a real feeling of structure — suddenly, it takes on a whole new feel.

Tomorrow I’ll hopefully get the casing more solidified and perhaps have things talking over ZigBee, as I’d like it to be wireless.  We’ll see how much I can get done before presenting the progress in class.