General Update

I thought it was about to time to give a quick update after some recent developments!

The Charms Of The Sea installation project is nearing completion and is looking rather good. If you're in Scarborough from the 18th to the 28th of November be sure to call in at the Rotunda Museum. I will be present on a few ocassions to give any technical support as well as talk about the project with members of the public.

In other news, today I had the pleasure of hearing a talk by and meeting Satoshi Shiraishi, a Japanese musician and artist based in Holland. He gave a very intersting presentation on realtime timbre analysis and performance with a homemade digital instrument constructed from water pipes and a saxophone/clarinet mouthpiece! He also showed some great videos of previous performances/installations and demonstrated some very nice MaxMSP/Jitter patches including a fascinating 'realtime timbre space' rendering frequencies in a three-dimensional OpenGL environment.

It wasn't until after the talk and I was speaking to Satoshi that I discovered one of my lecturers had demonstrated my own iTouch Synth to him and I was very honoured to have an artist as talented as himself be so complimentary about my work! I also found out that he and I have both been undertaking similar exlplorations in the use of electric guitars with Arduino hardware, very spooky indeed.

Having been reminded of this today I thought I should give an update on 'Strat-O-Synth'. The project is now back on track and I have for the last few days been working on the framework of the FM synth that will be controllable with the Arduino circuitry I'm rigging up with my guitar and playable with the pitch-tracked guitar itself. The components will now be mounted to the guitar in some form of external enclosure that I am currently sourcing. Stay tuned for further updates!

New Project - Virtual Instrument With Guitar Control

Hi there, I thought it was about time to make my first official post on my blog and outline my plans for a new project! Here goes:

Some hardware I'll be using in my new project!

For the final year of my degree beginning this Autumn, I've once again chosen a module that focuses on creating and utilising alternative and interesting forms of interactive music performance (or composition, art installations etc.). Following the success of my 'iTouch Synth' (Mac application available here!) I have again decided to design and create a virtual instrument, with an alternative method of control.

iTouch Synth'

 In the accompanying documentation for 'iTouch Synth', I stated that the limitations encountered in my previous computer music projects - the projects I have created in MaxMSP - had arisen due to a necessity to map my own creations to another person's i.e. my software patch to a their hardware controller. With this in mind, I found using the customisable environment of the iPod application TouchOSC liberating, given that I could custom fit my own controls to software patch.

I love my MIDI controller, but it has its limitations.

 As much as I enjoyed and was pleased using this customisable touch-screen control - which I will continue to use in the future - I couldn't help but long for the feeling of tactile controls! It was this longing and a hypothetical idea for expanding the capability of existing instruments that brought me to my latest project idea.

iPod Touch - too flat!

 At this stage, my basic plan is to have a virtual instrument - a synth or sampler, possibly a hybrid - that is played using my electric guitar - with frequency and amplitude tracking etc. Alongside this I plan to employ hardware controls for adjustment of software parameters. Rather than using my current MIDI controllers, iTouch or investing in a floor-controller, I've instead decided to have integrated controls on and within my electric guitar, using the open-source hardware Arduino.

My Arduino Duemilanove and breadbord.

So far my experiments have covered FFT frequency tracking and re-synthesis as well as endless breadbord prototyping of the hardware but the project is developing quickly! Stay posted here in coming weeks for information on this developing project!

Some of the components to be added to my guitar.