A Week of Making: Day 3

One-A-Day, Physical Computing

Still wanting to work with sound, but feeling a bit defeated by yesterday’s (somewhat) unsuccessful pursuit, I wired up a potentiometer to a speaker. Turning the potentiometer controls the pitch as well as toggles between the two LEDs. This small project is an iteration on my previous “siren” in which the user alternated pressing two buttons to generate a distinct pitch associated with each LED. By now implementing a similar system but using the potentiometer, it’s a little more like a blended “weeee-wooo” sound heard from emergency vehicles. And I think the code is now more precise! Imagine the passenger in a police car having to turn a knob back and forth as they race to an emergency!

screenshot-2016-10-06-20-50-58

A Week of Making: Day 2

One-A-Day, Physical Computing

Input: Button; Output: Tone

After reading and researching alternative forms of writing music, I came across Terry Riley’s In C. It consists of 53 short musical phrases to be played in order, but each phrase is to be played as many times as each musician chooses.

Using this as a framework, I wanted to use a number of push buttons and associated speakers to act as each musician. When a button is pressed, the “musician” advances to the next bar. Until this event occurs, the phrase plays on loop. In this way, it allows an individual to perform the piece without requiring an ensemble.

So far I’ve programmed two buttons/speaker sets, as well as the melodies for 2 bars — but the speakers are playing the music in series rather than both outputting simultaneously. I suspect this has to do with my “play tone” code being part of the for loop and sequentially for each speaker. I think I might need to have the looping of sound occur automatically rather than reading the melody each time loop() is called over and over.

link to code

Luciano Berio

Reference

“A musical work always has an impalpable zone with which we can only come to grips through the mediating influence of works that we have already assimilated. They don’t necessarily have to be works that we identify with, but ones that we draw close to and observe—in other words, love—because they seem more richly impregnated with history than do other works, and because we find ourselves more freely able to invest them with what is perhaps the unrealized best of ourselves, and with a more open expression of our musical unconscious.”

Luciano Berio: Two Interviews (1985), bolding mine

This idea of finding ourselves within the work of others ties back to my earlier post about remixing and the influence of others’ creative work. But it also goes further by arguing that association is a means of identifying ourselves – or getting to know ourselves.

A Week of Making: Day 1

One-A-Day, Physical Computing

Input: Force; Output: Multiple LEDs

As a challenge for the week, I’ve set out to make a “physical-computing-something” every day. To start, I revisited an earlier prompt to make a Love-O-Meter. An increase in force applied to the FSR results in each of the lights turning on at different steps. More force = more love = more LEDs. I set the breakpoints to increase non-linearly so that (in theory) it is more difficult to be more in love.

Sirens and Finger Wagging

Physical Computing

By combining what I’ve learned about switches and speakers, I rigged up a mini siren that sounds and blinks when alternating between two buttons.

(link to code)

Following this thread of somewhat obnoxious devices, I also made a “Nuh-Uh!” finger wagger. It reads the force applied to a force pressure sensor and maps that to the “speed” of rotation via changing the angle increment. Critical to the finger-wag motion was having the servo rotate in both directions (from 0 to 180 degrees and back from 180 to 0). By detecting whether the angle was at 180 or 0, I then either added or subtracted the increment value.

finger-wag