recent dalliances

Recording of my delay unit with ableton augmentation: 



Folded paper looping animation experiment... 


fold loop system 2 from michael page on Vimeo.

sad hing-hon franken-glock :-(

 sadly its not currently working very well :-(

contacts from glock to corresponding keyboard note

hing-hon guts

beaters with ground contact and little mics close up

special beaters

Ive been building a hing hon into a glockenspeil so when you strike the bars with the beaters it plays the corresponding note on the keyboard, so you get sonorous glock-sound with simulanious squarewave grunt.  Sexy. This is SEEMINGLY easily done as all the keys go to ground so the ends of the beaters just need grounding contacts to trigger.  Or so I thought...

It turns out though that you have to have the beater in contact with the bar for a fractionally longer period of time than an ordinary bar strike to get it to trigger with any regularity.  This is no good as then that dampens the bar and stops it from ringing.  I was thinking this is possibly failing because the keyboard is probably scanning all the notes in turn to see if one is being triggered and if it doesnt happen that that corresponds with when the beater strike is it doesnt register. 
Correct?

A sort of fix i thought of was to make keys to press that strike the underside of the bars (like some childrens toy glock things you may have seen) then have the contacts on the keys, special gloves to connect finger presses to ground might be needed but from playing around with the circuit just touching key contacts with skin seems to trigger them so silly gloves might not be necessary.

sound sculpture idea

This is partially inspired by a talk by  Yashas Setty when he discussed the idea of an organic modular sythesizer.  Also by a radio theramin piece by my friend Joanna Haywood.

I will make this sometime soon.  I just saw a butterfly out the window.  The way it moves would also sound truly cool!

New design

I realised that I wouldnt have access to a laser cutter for a while as I am leaving my job and leaving London (and its hackspace).  So I thought I'd better get any PCB making done quick sharp.  Here is the new rotary switch design.  Its sort of a compromise as it doesnt try and do a few things that the previous finished and other hypotesised versions were trying to do ((actualised) virtual stepless sequencing / hypotheisied acutal stepless sequencing, and polyrythmic patterns/logic gate fun) however I decided it was time to simplify a bit to try and get something that actually works well enough.  Here is the design!

 

H/S/B/B performance at Gasworks

Hackspace Big Band have been invited to perform at gas works gallery by Yashas Setty who is the current artist in residence.  He does fascinating art projects with experiemental biology.  Wowzaz!  Its going to be Brillz!

Beam Vid

Heres the end part of my performance at BEAM festival

new satanic designs!

this video shows the mechanics rather than the awesome functionality of this design.  It is truely illuminati adn works rather well for devil summoning, however as a musical demonstration, today I could not summon chopsticks.

...and thus onto the next design.  Here are some sneak peaks of the new face layout.  This will feature note sustain and 'PPP* and/or functions' TM (and much much more!!!)  :

 
*poly-pattern-party

Beam shotz

I performed solo and with the hackspace big band at BEAM festival last month.  It was a real rush to get my current setup ready in time but managed to get everything 'working' and have a couple of practices just in the nick of time!  I think it went well and I'll have videos of it some time soon.  Heres a couple of photos of the Hackspace Big Band performance.

 

Ive been accepted to perform at BEAM festival!

http://www.beamfestival.com/

(eeeek!)

Ive had a break through with seq designs , the new ones are actually depressingly similar to the very first attempt based around a rotary switch that I made many moons ago. Isnt that ironic? Alanis?!  Isnt it?! Hmmm?!?

Here are some variants Ive been through, none of which are going to be the final one.

seq demo vid

hereee we gooooooooooooooo!

bullets

I just found some 'bullet time' or 'time slice' or 'wizz-bang' video clips I made a couple of years ago. I made a blue screen tube with 24 little video cameras poking through little holes in the fabric...




music - Transforest Alignment - Luke Abbott
(this is just to accompany it, this is not the official video)