ChaoDependant feet

Thanks to the kindness of TINT, we're exhibiting both Chaodependant (by me, Owen Green and Agelos Papdakis) and Memory (by Parag Mital and Agelos Papadakis) at the Kinetica art fair in London.

The last times Chaodependant go shown, it worked great, but the carpet base it was on looked awful. So, for taking it down to Kinetica we decided to put it on a more professional platform. Apart from aesthetics, we also wanted to address the problem that the pendulum gets further away from the pods towards the end of it's swing, and hence they have less effect on the movement.

I've repeatedly come across the need to read or write Raster files in Java. These are data files which represent a rectangular grid of data using ASCII representations of numbers. An example, from GeoTools:

ncols 157

59 66 73 79 86 92 97 102 106 109 112 113 113 113 111 109 106

All values can be doubles or ints.

I've been having a fight with Max4Live recently about using midi devices. I'd like to make a gigantic patch which integrates all my control surfaces, and replaces lots of the automap functionality with something that fits my playing style better. The problem is:

• m4l replaces max's midi functionality with its own driver, which takes midi from the Live channel the device is on.
• so you can't use multiple devices in a patch. At least, you can't differentiate them.
• a workaround would be to put each device on a different midi channel, and then separate the midi data inside the patch.

Servo with Phone coil attached to Arduino I started playing with an Arduino and a servo motor as preparation for a project I'm working on. Using an Arduino Nano on a breakout board, the setup just consists of plugging the three pin lead from the servo into one of the digital out ports.

Crowdsourcing refers to using the general population to carry out tasks, often for free. Often, the idea is that by combining many inputs of unknown or variable quality, high quality outputs can be created - either through selection or some form of organisation.

I've got my RhythmSequence working nicely as an M4L Device - the timing's correct, and it seems quite happy. I'll post code tomorrow when I'm awake. In the meantime, here's a picture.RhythmSequence 2

Just had my first experimentation with Max4Live, and enjoying it so far. I haven't gone in depth into the control aspects of it so far, I've just been porting across a half finished Java project I was working on before. It's a sequence completion algorithm, aimed at rhythm generation, learning from realtime input. It's relatively simple at the moment, but once it starts dealing with metric structure I have a bad feeling it's going to get a lot more complicated.

I'm going to spend a couple of posts talking about some techniques I've been using while building and calibrating models, as they seem to be less well known than they might be. The first in this series is Sensitivity Analysis.

What is Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis

UA and SA are techniques to analyse the robustness of model outputs; that is, given a model, and certain assumptions about its input parameters (and their distributions), we would like to know how much we can trust the output. In general terms, Uncertainty Analysis gives us the amount of uncertainty (or variance) in the model output, while Sensitivity Analysis tells us how much of that variance is due to each of the input factors.

For the second time in two days, I came across the terms emic and etic, so it's time to have a bit more of a look into what they mean. This was prompted by a paper on JASSS1, which I found following up on the links between Prospect Theory and ABM. (Not while looking for ways to model crack dealers.)

1. 1. Agents in Living Color: Towards Emic Agent-Based Models