Thanks to the windy ways of the web, I've found myself working with some truly talented musicians/techies/electronics experts over on the otherside of the pond in California, on a very exciting interactive, generative audio/visual project. The number of traditional instruments they have and play wasn't enough for them, so they decided to build their own, as one does when in that situation - one of which is the bricktable, a tangible and multi-touch table - and instrument.

I've worked on a number of interesting interactive audio projects, but the approach in this one is quite different and i"m very excitied to be working with the bricktable guys on it.

In one line: You control parameters of a chaotic environment - which affect the behaviour of its inhabitants - which create and control music. 

To breakdown very briefly without going into much detail:

First video from the Glastonbury 2008 PI installation is below, and photos can be seen here.

Some info on the installation below:

This is a little teaser for an audio visual interactive installation I'm working on for Glastonbury 2008. It'll be projected around the entire (almost) 65ft interior of a 50ft round tent with multiple channels of audio. Everyone inside will be contributing to the audio/visual experience. Located behind the Laundrettas' crashed plane / laundrette in Trash City, more info at the official site pi.seeper.com

This is the beginnings of a Processing / Java port of the webcam-to-osc/midi app I originally did in Quartz Composer. The source code for the processing version is below, and you can watch (or download) the Quartz Composer version here).

Its quite early days yet and doesn't have all the features I want (scales, realtime sizing of grid etc.), but I'm posting posting it because:
a.) it does work on a basic level,
b.) It was requested on the processing forums and I thought it might be useful...

It doesn't transmit midi, but does transmit OSC, and I'm using OSCulator to forward the OSC messages to midi. I prefer doing it this way because I can have another computer on wifi receive the OSC messages and map to midi (and send to Logic), keeping the CPU on both machines lighter... (or just keep the oscTargetIP as 127.0.0.1 to send the OSC to the same machine and have everything running on one machine. Flexibility is always sweet).

I just returned from a fantastic week in Aldeburgh courtesy of Aldeburgh Music on the New Music New Media 2008 Workshop, and what a week it was...

Working with 14 amazing contemporary musicians - 6 composers and 8 performers, including cellist Olly Coates and pianist Sarah Nicolls - masters of sound-tech Sound Intermedia; and fellow visualists / interactive tech-geeks at Flat-E we delved into some nice Exploration of Audio Visual Diversity.

A test in motion detection in Quartz Composer 3.0.

The music is all generated in real-time by me waving my fingers, hands and arms around (or in fact any motion) in front of a standard web-cam. No post-processing was done on the audio or the video.

The concept is by no means new, but still fun nevertheless - and I'm quite happy with this implementation. I'm using a very simple frame difference technique and generating midi notes based on where-ever there is movement (actually, as QC3 cannot send midi notes I had to send the data as OSC and use OSCulator to forward them as midi).

This is a demonstration of the different signal modes I added to the Mac OSX Wiimote midi driver - WiiToMidi.

None of the demonstrated signals use the IR sensor so the user has complete freedom of movement (can swing in 360s), stand pretty faraway from any received, computer etc. - and the Nunchuk also has the same position, velocity, orientation etc.

I showed the VDMX / QC setup used in 'Amoeba Dance - Caliper Remote' to my girlfriend and some her friends and this is what they came up with.

Who needs Autechre when you have a bunch of mad girls!!

P.S. I have hours of footage of this if anyone is interested :P

This is a little test using GLSL in Quartz Composer 3.0, and controlling via VDMX. All happening in realtime and completely audio-reactive with no post production or timeline animations etc. The potential is humongous and very exciting!!

WiiToMidi (wii2midi) is an open-source Mac OSX driver to convert Wiimote and Nunchuk (Niintendo Wii motion based controllers) data to midi. Its a Cocoa application based on the DarwiinRemote WiiRemote framework. Mike Verdone wrote the main app transmitting the values and button presses as midi. I added the modules to calculate and transmit an additional 16 midi cc messages. These are for calculating/transmitting the velocity, position offset and orientation for both the wiimote and nunchuk.