2D Barcodes Part 2: mp3 and colours

Today, I am exploring Snapmaze that allows you to make 2D barcodes with different colours. Also, I tried to do a barcode with an mp3:

In addition, I think that everybody needs a positive phrase everyday, so here are different barcode with different colours to think more positive. To see this quotes or download the mp3 just use your mobile phone's camera.

Finally, I found Maestro that allows you to insert a location on a map and work on dimensions and colour!

A possible final use in a calendar to have a positive and maybe unknow phrase everyday/month

Fun with Tape-Heads

Hello all, for one of this weeks experiments I made a device for manually playing back magnetically stored data ( eg credit cards , cassette tapes, floppy disks, etc). This idea was taken from Nic Collin's Homemade Electronic Music book.

This was made using a tape head that was taken out of a standard cassestte player (preferably broken, as it definitely will be afterwards). Hopefully with the wires intact, we can then solder these onto a standard guitar lead which has been cut in half (about an inch of the outer coating stripped back ,the outer wires braided together, and then the inner coating stripped also about an inch).




I then made a sound board out of a cassette tape and a bit of cardboard (it is better if you mix a few together to give you a more varied sound). This was done by simply taking a cassette, cutting the tape at the opening, and wrapping it carefully around the piece of cardboard, until you have something that looks like this -



What we have done is essentially taken an analog mobile music playing device (the cassette player) and hacked it so that we can have more control about the sounds that we produce from the data provided. In effect, it acts a bit like a primitive sampler, allowing us to skip, scratch, speed up, slow down, and mash together tracks on top of each other.

Experiments like this are very simple, but allow us to consider all the data around us, as it can also sonify those old credit cards and magnetic data which sit collecting dust. Hacks like this also allow us to explore and understand sound and technology, by stripping it back to its bare components.

work in progress

I am working on what I think will become my main project. The project is an extension of the noisy self miking rhythm stick developed earlier this term. The concept is to develop a musical game, taking the idea of using dice to generate random patterns within a set of parameters, inspired by a set of poker dice which I have kept since I was 18.

The idea is to use reacTIVision to read fiducials from the faces of five dice, the values and location of which will be interpreted using Processing and this will be passed as midi messages to Ableton Live and used to trigger loops, and control the volume and position of each loop within the mix.

The concerns I have is to create a rich experience with the game; if it is just based on the possible permutations of the set, 7,776 combinations in all, then the game is limited and self reproducing. By using some of the information about the location of the dice relative to the table, based on the centre of the playing area, then I will incorporate a level of complexity which will render the repeatability almost impossible.

No pictures of the game yet, and the code is still a bit lumpy, but i intend to have this up and running in a couple of weeks.

First steps with Arduino or How to make a cheap, quick, awful synth!

This week I attempted to make the most basic synthesizer using the arduino, some potentiometers and a piezo. So heres the setup,

I put the three potentiometers in a circuit, with a ground and power supply. Then on a separate circuit we plug in a piezo. Each potentiometer is connected to an analog input so the values can be read, and the piezo is connected to a digital pin.

This is basically an upgrade and mish-mash of a few basic examples on potentiometers (http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/AnalogInput) and on tones (http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Tone). The piezo generating tones depending on the values given by the potentiometers.




For this synth, as shown in the video, one potentiometer controls frequency (Hz), one duration of tone, and the other the frequency (time) of the tones. It makes a pretty horrible little sound, so I definitely wouldn't watch the whole minute of this video, but I am pretty impressed by how quick this sort of project can be put together.





Code @ http://experiments-in-sound-and-vision.blogspot.com/2010/03/first-steps-with-arduino-or-how-to-make.html

Game Tour - Test 1: Greenwich 27 Feb

Hi everyone,

Here is a link to the blog where I am working on my final project of game-tours... Last week I made the first test for my final project, doing the Game-Tour in Greenwich, London.

You can visit this link to see photos and to understand how the project worked.

I'll improve some interface and narrative elements for the final project.

Brighton mobile site is now working

Hello, I fixed my problem with Google maps in my mobile site using Google Code (thanks to my beloved wife).
Now the site is online with a map, clock, tweets about the city, your tweets and a Google news widget about Brighton. Please, go to: http://elmundialista.cl/gobuk

Another interesting event - InterMus group

Hi everyone

We will be having a seminar on Monday 15th March, 4pm-5.30, in the Russell Building (room 12). There will be two talks, one from Frauke Behrendt (Media) and one from Paola Cannas (Music). All welcome.

Frauke Behrendt will be speaking on her work with sound-based creative use of mobile technology. Her talk is titled "A Taxonomy of Mobile Sound Art".

Paola Cannas's talk: "Technologies and performance: a vibrant interaction" is a reflection on her experiences, as a musicologist, with tools developed through interdisciplinary research.

----

InterMus stands for Interdisciplinary Music/Sound Research Seminars. These seminars are for anyone interested in music research from a variety of different disciplines. Including (but not restricted to) Music, Music Informatics, Psychology, Media and Film, Neuroscience, Creative Systems, Informatics, Music Education, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics and Acoustics.

If you are interested in these seminars please do join our mailing list at https://lists.sussex.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/intermus. Usually we will use the intermus mailing list to announce seminars and send out further details such as abstracts for talks etc.

Please feel free to pass this email on to anyone who you think may be interested.

Anna Jordanous and Chris Kiefer
Music Informatics

Interesting events

Hi guys,

Just to let you know about this event - should be interesting ....

NATIONAL TESTING GROUNDS OF LIVE ART

Live Art and Music Event

Mikahil Karikis, Mitch & Parry, Kristin Sherman, Dori Deng and Meta Drcar

Saturday 13th March 2010

7:00pm - 10:00pm

£4

Boundaries, Fluidity and Dislocations are the focus for the programme, the commissioned artists explicitly exploring ideas around liminal access and departures: the boundaries of the body - and the distance between bodies, the exploration of sound and the confinements of our physicality, the limitations of the gallery space, of the self, of the other, of the individual and of group migrations in our geography, identities and disruption across the artistic and the non artistic.

For this Testing Grounds event Mikhail Karikis explores parallels between the nature of the medium of sound and politics of migration; thinking of sound as a perpetual immigrant, always travelling away from its place and material of origin, penetrating invisibly into spaces where it may not be welcome.

Kristin Sherman explores structures of power made manifest through intricate performance machines. Her work for Testing Grounds paints a dark and humorous portrayal of power and control, a system made of bodies, where each actor monitors the other. Taken to extremes, the work questions and challenges our notions of freedom.

Mitch & Parry's new working project examines the landscape of the body as a space for collecting and exhibiting the stains and marks of loss, love and labour, by developing their work of creating external discourse with internal bodily fluid - creating a tension between provoking and inviting the spectator.

Dori Deng and Meta Drcar 's Measuring series is a meditation on relations between space and different medias including the body, visuals and sound. The action of measuring is presented physically, but also through mathematical connections, of musical rhythm and time in order to change the dimension and the proportion of the gallery space, twisting our assumption or expectation of a given context.

Testing Grounds hopes to contribute to the richness of the South East region's Live Art scene by creating a place where audiences can glimpse the newest work, be provoked, discuss new ideas and socialise. This event is co-curated with Permanent, and supported by the Lighthouse and funded by Arts Council England South East.

www.testinggrounds.org.uk

PERMANENT 20 Bedford Place, Brighton, BN1 2PT

Thinking about Mobile and Locative Media

... I think that it is more than media, than medium, it is part of our everyday life and it's really changing it.... Particularly I like the idea of mobile technology as a learning tool, playful tool, a medium to get in touch and to understand and live the city and our everyday life in a different and maybe better way....

location&relation

hello everyone, last week i have collected some information of friends location in brighton. i asked them to mark their living location at google map by using the same account.

Then i made a graphic which has some spots are just corresponding the exact location on google map. and the lines between the spots is referring to the relations between them, in other words, i know them all, but also some of them know each other. and if some people are just in a round circle, which they all know each other. So far i just done these...i feel headache now..mmmm .. and if anyone has any ideas to help me develop it further, im very thankful...

Mobile Brighton Guide (David)

I did this basic mobile page called "Where to go in Brighton?" (http://elmundialista.cl/gobuk) copying Facebook's mobile code to fit it to the iPhone screen size. I have to fix some problems with the Google maps compatibility, maybe you can help me. Thanks.

Weekly Route

For this week I decided to track my routes from Saturday to Wednesday. I used it Google Maps and the Map software of my mobile phone to save some locations and use them as a guide to draw the lines later on Google Map.

It wasn't too easy because it is not automatic as maybe would be tracing the routes with a GPS software...

Here are the results:

PING IMAGE (JUST TRACES)

 

GOOGLE MAP VERSION (WITH MARK AND IMAGES)

I feel that maybe it is too much information but it was the task and I think that is useful if you want to understand the traces above. 

View My weekly route in a larger map

2D Barcode: Promoting Latin American Poetry

Hi!

This weeek I created some 2D barcodes using i-nigma. These codes have poetry poems of Mario Benedetti, from Uruguay in English and Spanish. You can red the texts, downloading i-nigma to your mobile to use it as a scanner.

My idea is to do more 2D barcodes related with Latin American poetry and maybe putting them together or distributed in different places... I'm thinking in that.

To see the complete procedure go to: http://themediaexperience.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/read-mario-benedetti-tactics-and-strategy/

 

 

Rhythm Stick contact mic

I know this is a dangerous precedent, but I was listening to Andrew last week, and he mentioned that if you take a piezo electric transducer (PZT), wire it up as a contact mic, connect it to a recorder and turn up the volume, then they can be noisy in a musical way.

I found this interesting as I have made contact mics from time to time, and had not noticed the background noise particularly, so I decided to have a look at this, to see if there is a way of reinforcing this aspect of the output.

This confection is a PZT which I stripped of a plastic protecting ring, and soldered up to an unbalanced mono audio jack lead. The springs are extended, to partially isolate the PZT, and to apply some stress to the PZT to trigger the cell. The pins are hammered into a solo rhythm stick, and the soldered lead is taped to the stick to support the joints.

When connected up to a mini amp, the mic is quiet until the springs start to ring, after which the circuit will start to feedback. It is possible that the stripped PZT could be used as a cheap replacement to a microphone in surveillance systems where the presence of a noise is required to trigger the attention of a video system.

Ru

Brighton Grand Prix (Montecarlo) - David

New York

Hello all, for this weeks walking task I decided to use New York as my guide. I have never been to NY and thought this might be a good chance. I chose five tourist spots and set out to find them, documenting each with four photographs -

A. Central Park -

B. Carnegie Hall -



C. MOMA -



D. Rockefeller Center -



E. Times Square -

Brighton & Santiago Routes: From train stations to ???

The basic map is a route from Mapocho Station to bar "La piojera" in Santiago, Chile.
Mapocho Station used to be the main train station of the country and now it is a cultural centre and bar "La Piojera" is one of the most traditional Chilean bars full of tourists and local people.

I decided to work with this map, wondering if I was going to arrive to a bar too in Brighton... so, let's see what happened.

You can compare the area in Brighton and Santiago looking to the photos in each icon.


View Route Santiago-Brighton in a larger map

Beijing in Brighton

task for last week

hello everyone,

i followed the map of my hometown tianjin in china, there is a main river in my hometown. i just followed the route of the river and walked in brighton. i started from the brighton station and walked down queens rd, then back to the crossing and walked up to Dyke Rd, then turn to western rd, upper N St is just correspond the first left fork on the map of the river. Church St is the first right fork of the river, then the river diverse to two branches, so then i walked to

clifton terrace.

Mapping the Space

For this weeks task of exploring Brighton, while following a different landscape, I have used a map which details the quickest route t0 the goal of the maze at Hampton Court (link to maze on Google Maps).

A great guide to garden mazes is here, and the route I followed looks like:

The rules I followed in recreating the maze in Brighton were:

I started by the gates of the station on Queens Road, looking down to the sea,

I walke the map, and followed the next turning which matched the direction of the turn indicated on the maze map (left for left and right for right),

I ignored the different angles and the distances indicated in the maze map, and treated the two small chicanes on the "upsloping sides" of the map as full corners, and from here I set off down Queens Road.

The maze has many angles which are more acute and obtuse that the largely grid system of the streets of Brighton, and the street lengths are far longer, so while the goal of the maze can be reached quickly, tracing the route in Brighton took one and a half hours.

I soon realised that I didn't have a clue where the goal would fall, and the path looped back on itself very quickly, with the path running in a clockwise loop around the junction of North Road and Queens Road.

Walking across the front of Churchill Square, I suddenly thought that following the map would guide the route off into the sea. Walking passed Russell Square this looked very likely, only for the route to run along Russell Road, behind the Brighton Centre and away from the seafront. I never got to walk along the seafront.

Later, after a loop around the church on Dyke Road, just as I thought the path would run bck to follow Queen Road and run back into North Laine to finish, a right turn along Zion Gardens appeared, and following this led along towards the Clock Tower and took the path south into the Lanes.

The final loop of the path the route followed was along Ship Street, left and left again to travel North up West Street, and left again leaving the Goal of the maze as Fabrica and the corner of Ship Street.