Reactable stuff

I built the skeleton of the reactable this week with Branden and it's BIG! The glass will be 1m x 1m. I'm also getting the plywood to sheet it hopefully today so I can start painting it...
I got the fiducials printed onto clear vinyl with white ink, so hopefully it works, thanks to Victoria Shearer, my graphic designer for helping me out with the printing.
I'm still looking for wooden cubes, anyone have any ideas? I'm trying Michaels today...
I know I can cut them too, but I was hoping to find some pre-fabricated ones somewhere.
I want to test everything out, but I'm still waiting on the plexi, and hopefully there are no problems with the uv index of the plexi, I just found out that some plexi doesn't let black light through, which is what we are trying to use.....

Sonic Boom

So I checked out Emmedia's Sonic Boom show on Friday with a few other members of ALork, to watch our professor Adam Tindale play his e-drumset, along with other sonic artists/musicians. The coolest part was that it was at the Discovery Dome at the Telus World of Science, so like a huge concave screen and intense acoustics. All of the performances were really interesting. I especially liked the group performance of all the artists called The Electron Orchestra Withdrawal. It was really cool to see Adam play the drums, because we never get to see that side of him, only tech-y glitchy computer music side of Adam. And it was really awesome to see four very different artists working so well together, they all complemented eachother without competing sounds at all. Jackson 2Bears performance was absolutely amazing though, you don't hear as much continuous rhythmic scratching in music anymore, so it was a refreshing performance, along with his unbelievable table skills. That guy can work his vinyl for sure! His DJ/VJ set discussed Native Canadian cultural stereotypes, and he used several historical film and audio samples.

I found this video on youtube of his work.


The whole show was really interesting, it was definitely not a typical Friday night!

The Reactable

So Greg Debicki and I are trying our hand at building our own version of the Music Technology Group's Reactable. It's a tangible interface that recognizes shapes to create musical relationships.

Here's a demo from Berlin...


We have a couple of modifications for our version of it, for example we are going to experiment with black lights, as well as the sounds will be completely original.

I'm going to to the store to go buy the wood today and begin building the main cube.

We were wondering what material to use for the cubes...does anyone know anything about moulding rubber or plastic or anything like that? Or have any ideas of a good material to use?

ALork Composition

So this morning Alex, Andrew and I discussed our upcoming performance. We all agreed the piece will sound more unified and cleaner if we either a) know what each other's patch sounds like and compose our piece accordingly or b) use similar patches to create a singular sound.
Andrew's sampler patch is looking pretty neat, and he's been working on it a ton, so we were thinking of using his patch in the performance. Maybe we can have 2 different patches with 2-3 people playing on each one, so it creates a nice layered sound?

My idea for the composition is based on a panning-type approach. There would be two different groups, with the same patches given to both groups. Both groups will follows a 16-8-4-2-1-1 bar length pattern, but alternating back and forth.
( Group 1 would play for 16 bars, then Group 2 for 16 bars, Group 1 for 8 bars, Group 2 for 8 bars, Group 1 for 4 bars, Group 2 for 4 bars, Group 1 for 2 bars, Group 2 for 2 bars, Group 1 for 1 bar, Group 2 for 1 bar, Group 1 for 1 bar, Group 2 for 1 bar)
Then everyone would play together, and decrease volume in a decrescendo until the piece goes quiet.

I thought this would be neat because it's kind of reciprocal and like panning.... I don't know what it would sound like yet though....

Music/Dancer Interactivity

So the MADT Festival is over now, it ran all last week... and I can finally breathe!
The installation went up on Wednesday and ran until Friday, and it went pretty good. There are definitely many things I want to work on and expand with this project, such as more detailed motion control and more sensitive sensors, perhaps using more cameras.
But overall I was pretty happy with it, on Thursday at the opening, I had contemporary dancer Alexandra Laird do a 10 minute performance in the installation, and the sound responded beautifully to her movements. Her dance performance really demonstrated the installation to it's potential.
I want to definitely work on more dance/music interactive works, and for my Studio Seminar class, we have to choose a topic to write a scholarly paper for ( eg. for a journal or conference) and I chose to research the topic of Music/Dancer Interactivity, especially focusing on the many of the new digital and electronic motion tracking and motion capture technologies. I found a ton of great resources online, and I'm heading to the library today to see what I can find on paper.
I'll post the video of the installation when I get it uploaded!