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VSB Lou Harrison Recordings

Mon, 29 May 2017 17:00:00 +0000

Last year I joined the Venerable Showers of Beauty (VSB) Javanese Gamelan. I have played with a few different groups now, but this is the first with regular gigs.

Next month we are part of an event where we will be playing a number of pieces by and inspired by Lou Harrison, a Portland born composer who used both western and non-western instruments in his compositions.

Here are some details of the event: CeLOUbration: Concert Series Friday, June 16, 2017 - 7:30pm

Anyways, before I joined they recorded a number of Lou Harrison pieces and they just released them!

Cherish, Consider, Conserve, Create: Compositions for Gamelan by Lou Harrison by The Venerable Showers of Beauty Gamelan

You can get a physical copy at the VSB CD Baby page.

I put together the bandcamp posting for the release but otherwise I wasn’t involved with this recording.

One of the group’s members, Brett Campbell co-wrote a book about Lou Harrison which is now available as well.

Ambient DJ Mix for Alleys of your Mind Radio show

Mon, 29 May 2017 16:00:00 +0000

My friends Ian and Mikey run the Alleys of your Mind radio show on Freeform radio Portland. A while ago Ian asked me to make a mix for them to broadcast as I’m busy during the time when I could do it live. I decided to make a mostly ambient mix as I had been putting together some ambient tracks for a bit. Here it is, my mix takes up about the first hour of the stream.

Track List

Jack Smith: ‘Silent Shadows on Cinmaroc Island’
Concern: ‘Mending’
Summe: ‘03:17’
Zoviet France: ‘Mute Moon’
Doug Theriault: ‘The Mind is Familiar’
Coil: ‘Magnetic North’
Kink Gong: ‘Baozoo Khen’
Atom Heart: ‘Metrik’
Nocturnal Emissions: ‘Vegetation Narration’
Kraftwerk: ‘Stratovarius’
P16.D4: ‘Kühe In 1/2 Trauer’
Jack Smith: ‘Earthquake Orgy’
Caroline K: ‘The Happening World

I used Data Jockey, the f/loss DJ software I have been writing for a few years. Direct source code link: github repo.

Futel Installation

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 11:39:00 +0000

I installed a Futel phone in my front yard this past weekend. I’ve been meaning to do it for some time now but finally got it together.

I was originally planning to do a free lending library style enclosure and a desk phone, but then Karl/Elijah hooked me up with this really nice courtesy phone, so I went with that.

The phone enclosure is made of reclaimed wood from my fence, some yard refuse, and a piece of free roofing I got from a bar. I built a small light out of some spare LEDs I had and some frosted plastic that a friend left over at my place. I think the enclosure has a somewhat outhouse or chicken-coop look to it, which I’m pretty into.

DJ Mix

Sat, 16 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Bed of Roses posted a DJ mix I made (soundcloud) this past month.

Photo by Tara Swenson 2014

I used Data Jockey, the f/loss DJ software I have been writing for a few years. Direct source code link: github repo.

Church of Robotron

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 08:34:02 +0000

Some friends of mine really like Robotron 2084 and while I’m not a big gamer, it is certainly my favorite video game. Its simplistic but very difficult and has post apocalyptic robot take over back story that is appealing to nerds like me.

A couple of years 2 or 3 of them decided that they’d like to make a Church of Robotron, this was largely driven by Brian Richardson/BTR, Elijah St Clair/ES and Karl Anderson. Initially Brian intended to turn his house into the church and the first step was to create an altar like box containing a MAME machine where you could play the game and at the same time pray to the mutant savior. The altar had 2 joysticks, the two eight ways, a screen, a button that would start a game, but I don’t think it was ever fully realised. But then Toorcamp 2012 came around and a number of people, largely nerds to frequent Dorkbot PDX in Portland Oregon, joined in, and created the Mobile Church of Robotron. I was one of those nerds. I identify as XNOR [or XOR when I can only use 3 letters] for this project.

Toorcamp gave us a large dome to house our installation. It was a really fun project and I’d say probably the centerpiece for the whole conference. Brian figured out how to detect when various events happened in the game such as enemy fire, player death, etc. and we used those events to trigger actions in the real world like fans, motors flapping things, lights, lasers, etc. Brian explains how he hooked into the game in a blog entry: Use MAME’s debugger to reverse engineer and extend old games.

I worked on a variety of things including: general lighting in the space, sound reenforcement, a kneeler that triggered light fades when you knelt, lights that flashed in your face when you died in the game, playback of sermon videos, and various construction, installation and stage hand like tasks [like stealing power from the main dome].

Our work was featured in Hack-A-Day and we have a webpage for the church with a lot of propaganda and a decent amount of real information.

DorkbotPDX 0×0A presentation

On March 25th, 2013 we did a presentation/performance about the church and specifically about the mobile church installation we did at Toorcamp 2012. We had James Adamson on stage giving sermons which we interspersed with presentations from a variety of people. The presenters were not actually visible on stage, instead our faces were projected onto one of 4 televisions that were sitting there, a Dr. O’Blivion inspiration. Mike Wallace captured a video of the presentation which you can see below.

LED Wall PopScience

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 03:18:29 +0000

Popular Science just published a brief blurb about our LED wall :
Bright Ideas: DIY Stage Lights From The 1930s And Today

They juxtaposed our project with a DIY Stage Lighting project they published a design for in 1937.

Composition for Balloons and Electronics

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 20:01:05 +0000

A few months ago Charles Buckingham told me about a crowd participatory composition idea he had where every person in a large crowd would have a smart phone that made sound which they could control, to some extent, that combined would form a work of music. After we together made several iterations on the idea: reinterpretations, misinterpretations, experimentation, research, etc. the project became a composition idea for a crowd participatory experiment using home made mylar balloons making buzzing tones and clicking sounds with pizeo transducers, lit up with RGB LEDs and finally popped with model rocket igniters and gun powder.

Charles told Leo Daedalus about this project and Leo was very interested. They decided that it would work for Leo’s The Late Now John Cage Centenary Special. This event happened September 20th, 2012 at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon.

Charles also told a film maker friend of his, Eric Macey , about the project and got him to document both the event itself but also a lot of the preparation for the event, which was a huge ordeal that came together in a vary inspiring way with the help of a lot of people in a very short amount of time. Eric should have a proper video of everything in a bit.

I worked on the electronics design and manufacturing as well as the firmware programming and Charles worked on the balloon research and manufacturing. We worked together on the arc of the sound, light and small flare/balloon popping composition.

The firmware, which was hacked together quick and sloppy, is in my balloon pwm github repository.

We used helium to float the balloons. Helium is very expensive these days because it is becoming more and more scarce. Charles spent a lot of time trying to find a source that would even guarantee us a tank, because most places these days will only guarantee helium for medical use. Luckily he eventually found a source but we didn’t end up having quite a much as we had hoped. We originally intended to have 100 balloons, but ended up only being able to manufacture around 75 because we ran out of a key component, and then we only ended up having enough helium to float around 35 of those. Either way, people really seemed to enjoy it. I was in a daze from long hours of work and last minute trouble shooting so I’m waiting to see the documentary video in order to have a better feel for the whole thing.

We have plans to revisit the idea with some updated software and more helium as well as a non participatory version with yet another software program and hydrogen filled balloons, which would be highly explosive.

Collaborators

This project wouldn’t have been possible without the help of a number of volunteers. These folks spent a bunch of their time, without payment, really last minute, helping us make, paint and inflate mylar balloons, build the electronics and finally share the piece with the crowd. It was really tedious work but I was surprised with how much people seemed to enjoy helping. Even before the piece was presented I felt like it was a success because of the amazing thing that happened when a lot of people got together and worked on an absurd and fun idea like this. Here is a list of people who helped, I hope I haven’t missed anyone:

Jeremy Adams, Alyssa Beers, Chrissie Bishop, Jared Boone, Gary Felix, Marybeth Hall, Kaisa Holt, Morgan Hynson, Alex Langeberg, Jesse Lauzon, Matthew Lippincott, Mike Lyons, Eric Macey, Jesse Mejia, Cole Miller, Kiel Moton, Philip Odom, Paul Parenteau, Jason Plumb, Brian Richardson, Thomas Suprenant, Ami Taylor, Emily Wahl

Preparation

I have some photos, unfortunately only captured with my cellphone camera so a number of them are blurry, of the electronics preparation. I’ll post some highlights here.

The controller boards. These boards drove the piezos, leds and rocket igniters and also had a button which those who were holding the board, which was attached to the balloon. The participators could press the buttons, which are red, in order to manipulate the parameters of the lighting, sound as well as the timing of everything including the rocket igniter which melted a small hole in the balloon in order to, hopefully, make it sink.

A pile of built boards and ribbon cables. The ribbon cables went from the boards which people held, to the balloon which had a piezo, RGB LED and rocket igniter taped or glued to it. The cables acted both as a tether for the balloon and an power/control conduit.

Boards with ribbon cables and battery packs, much more neatly arranged:

Chrissie, Marybeth and Charles making balloons. At the top you can see a wooden form that they used as a guide while ironing the balloons. Photo by Matthew Lippincott.

All the balloons were ironed by hand. Here Chrissie is putting in a valve.

Here is a balloon with the electronics. Near the top we have the rocket igniter and gunpowder, near the middle is the piezo buzzer and at the bottom of the balloon, its hard to see because its behind a piece of paper for better reflectance, is the LED.

Here is an unfortunately blurry shot of the rocket igniter and gunpowder on a balloon.

Balloons with electronics in the staging areas.

A rough sketch of the flow of the piece.

Me, exhausted, amongst some of the balloons in a staging area.

LED Wall

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 16:11:21 +0000

The band STRFKR hired Hans Lindauer and me to create a large [13 × 8 ft] low resolution [96 × 64 bright RGB pixels] video display for their live show.

Hans did a wonderful job designing and building the wall and I worked on the software.

We chose to drive the wall with composite video so that the band could hook up a variety of different video sources to the wall. Basically, anything that outputs composite video should work. The bulk of the work is done by a small computer running Linux with a composite video to USB adapter for video input and a teensy USB microcontroller to drive the LEDs. The computer uses GStreamer to take the video input, convert it from YUYV to RGB, deinterlace it, resize it to 96 × 64, and finally, using a custom video sink, write out data packets to via USB to the teensy.

The microcontroller is running a program written by Paul Stoffregen originally for this domestar project. The program takes 64 byte USB packets, iterates over each byte and sends out the individual bits to separate serial outputs. Basically this means you drive 8 serial clock/data lines with each byte, where the 1st bit goes to the 1st clock/data lines, 2nd to the 2nd.. etc. Besides some basic gamma correction, thresholding to turn the LEDs off when a pixel is close to black [so you get real blacks], the main function of my GStreamer program is to remap the video pixel information for this microcontroller. The wall consists of 8 separate panels which have a linear array of leds zig-zagging from the bottom left. This nicely mapped to the 8 data/clock pairs, each pair drives one of the panels.

Here is a picture of a test screen I used while testing it in my living room, before we had the panels in their final state, with the plastic coating removed and what not.

Here is the wall being set up:

Videos:

First show using the wall, Music Fest Northwest 2012, Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland, Oregon.

Second show using the wall, Regency Ballroom, San Fransisco, California.

Its obviously nicer when its a smaller space and dark. One of the really nice things about the wall is that the lights can really turn off, most projectors still project some light when they’re trying to show blacks.

Here is a music video with shots of the band practicing with the wall.

Here is a video with footage from one of their live shows.

More info:

Create Digital Motion did a writeup on our project.
And Hans made a pretty in depth build log
Here is a link to the code on github
Paul Stoffregen’s teensy

While we were testing it out we watched some of Tron:

Synth Panels

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 05:21:28 +0000

My friend/roommate Jesse and I have been building various modular synthesizer modules for what seems like a year or more now but we have yet to house any of our projects. We’ve built some VCOs, VCAs, filters, these things called Lopass Gates, but housing has been a real pain.

Recently I got a new job and now have access to a laser cutter. It is a lot of fun to play with and is proving to be very nice for making panels for our modules. So far I’ve only created a couple of prototypes, to make sure that my measurements are all correct.

Our friend Alex Langeburg designed us some graphics and has helped us with some design considerations. I’m using inkscape for the layout.

My first prototype used some translucent pink/orange acrylic, I painted it flat black and then etched the paint off and cut it with the laser. I really like the color but I don’t think it’ll work well with the rest of the colors I have for jacks, knobs, cabling and what not.

So I’ve settled on clear:

I think it will look really nice when it is back lit, though the pots cover the graphics, so we’ll have to figure out some edge lighting as well. Eventually I hope to house my project in a suitcase, or something reasonably mobile.

Toy Guitar Hacked MIDI controller

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:17:02 +0000

I found this guitar toy at a thrift store a few months back and decided to hack it in order to make it into a usb-midi controller.

I used a teensy, and library I wrote called xnormidi, which in turn uses LUFA to do the usb layer.

I’ve placed the code on github if anyone is curious. It might not be immediately useful but it does provide an example usage of the midi library. I also have some debouncing code in there that could be pulled into another project.

Interfacing with the toy was actually not very difficult. Internally it had a microcontroller board that loaded like a slot into another board that had the panel mount buttons and a bus to the neck buttons. I simply de-soldered and removed that microcontroller board, figured out the addressing scheme of the buttons, which used a typical matrix scanning scheme, and wrote some code drive + read the matrix. I had some extra I/O so I hooked in the switch and maybe one more button on the body that wasn’t driven by the matrix.

All of the buttons except one or two on the body send CC messages, the switch also sends CC messages and when you strum the little “string” things, it sends notes based on the button you’re holding on the neck. It is pretty fun. So far I’ve just hooked it into a few synths and messed around..

Here are some photos:

opps.. a little blury