Tag Archives: Processing

Gravity Pulling at Barking Legs Tonight

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I’m playing at Barking Legs in Chattanooga tonight in an event co-hosted by the Shaking Ray Levi Society. I haven’t been there since 2001 with James Keepnews, so it’ll be great to return.

Sunday October 7 7:30pm
Barking Legs Theater
1307 Dodds Avenue
Chattanooga TN

Along with playing some solo music for banjo and electronics, I’ll be collaborating with dancers and improvisers on a piece with video similar to the image above. I created the video my modeling the behavior of particles interacting with gravity using Processing. After the concert will be a short demo of my sensor-augmented banjo.

Facebook event

Previews articles:
Times Free Press
Chattanoogan

Cage Variations III

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I’ll be performing John Cage’s Variations III tomorrow night as part of a small group appearing on Tim Feeney’s concert honoring Lou Cohen. Cage’s score calls for dropping 42 sheets of transparent paper, each with a circle drawn on it. The performer finds the largest clump of overlapping circles and then counts the intersections. Above is a small Processing sketch I wrote to drop the circles for me. Reload the page to generate a new random placement of the circles.

Tuesday September 10 7:30pm
Tim Feeney Faculty Recital
University of Alabama Moody Music Building, Concert Hall
Tuscaloosa AL

 

Arduino On Board

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Photo by Nicholas Zambetti

I recently ordered an Arduino board to try another approach for getting sensor data into my computer. More and more of my students are using them, too, and I wanted some first-hand experience. Most of my previous work has been with the Basic Stamp family of boards. The Arduino arrived this week and I promptly sat down and gave it a try.

The first thing I noticed (aside from the price: the entire Arduino setup costs significantly less than similar boards!) was how much easier it was to get the Arduino going than the Stamp. This isn’t exactly a fair comparison, since my initial experience with Stamps was way back in 1999 or 2000, and it was also my first time fooling with microcontrollers. I’ve learned plenty since then, and the products (along with their attendant software) have come a long way. I have to give the nod to the Arduino for its cross-platform, open-source software. (When I first started with the Stamp I kept a junker 386 PC around, just to run the Stamp compiler. No fun.)

I’m also impressed by the Arduino software. I’ve admittedly done little more than fire up the example “sketches” and tweak a few lines of code. However, the Processing/Java-style language seems a better fit for my (weak) coding style. The community around the Arduino seems very active. There are already a number of projects that simplify moving data from the board to common software such as MaxMSP and Processing.

Then there’s also the luxury of the USB cable that serves for both communication and power supply. This may seem trivial, but I look forward to the day when I don’t need to change the battery in my sensor box before every performance, or carry a spare 9-volt wherever I go. I may also jettison my USB MIDI interface along with a MIDI cable required by my Stamp setup. Suddenly, though, my USB ports are getting a little crowded…

The one niggling worry I have is the serial communication with Max. Using MIDI is certainly slower, but seems foolproof to me: no handshaking necessary, a dead simple initialization process, etc. I hope my fears are simply due to a lack of experience; that once everything is setup and tested I’ll feel just as confident with the serial connection as I do with my aging MIDI cables.