There's a video up of a performance I did with Cavan Fyans, Adam Parkinson, Shiori Usui at the Bongo Club in Edinburgh.

We had 2 days to put together an improvised, electronic performance with new people. Our practise focussed around trying to have "musical" interactions while using the laptops.

Chaodependant

I'm going to use this post to collect photos and media from Kinetica 2010. To start with, here's Parag's Flickr set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pkmital/sets/72157623393186086/

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 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.

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.

ChaoDependant installed Final days of testing, and doesn't everything all seem to go wrong at the end!

It turned out that when the high power LEDs are running, they drag the supply voltage down by about 0.2V. Which would normally be OK, but the Hall sensors are giving voltages in the mV range, so the changing supply voltage gives a bigger signal than the actual magnetic signal.

Damn.

We tried a bunch of things, mostly involving big capacitors, but nothing worked really well.

It's really exciting when things start to come together... Last night me and Owen got two pods working: disturbing the pendulum bob, sensing it, and communicating with Max/MSP via the Arduino.