Matt Meshulam's Brain Dump

So a few months back, I showed how to use a footswitch as a MIDI controller using your soundcard and PD. I hinted at being able to use a similarly simple technique for a continuous controller, so that what I’ll be covering today. Thanks to my electronic music class, I’ve recently been doing a lot of work in Max/MSP, PD’s expensive big brother, so that’s the platform I used for this hack. It could be just as easily implemented in PD or another signal processing language.

This is a pretty simple trick, we are just sending a sine wave into the volume pedal and then measuring its level when it comes out. The level can then be used as a parameter to control any patch in Max/MSP or could be converted to a MIDI control.

For hardware, you’ll need a volume pedal (obviously) and a soundcard with at least one extra input and one extra output. My volume pedal is a big, beautiful cast iron number that I got years ago when I built my theremin. I had to change the potentiometer in it from a 500k to a 1k (it was all I had lying around), but your results may vary depending on your soundcard. I think anything 1k-100k should be fine.

Connect the output of your soundcard to the “instrument” jack on the pedal, and connect the pedal’s other jack to your soundcard’s input.  That’s it for the hardware! The patch itself isn’t much more complicated. Let’s take a look:

Click to download pedal.pat

This patcher is designed to be used as an object within another patch. It takes two arguments, the input channel and output channel of the soundcard, respectively. For example, you might write into an object box “pedal 2 3″ if you want to use input 2 and output 3. It has a single input port, which calibrates the control signal to 1 when you send it a bang. The output is a floating point number representing the position of the pedal.

The nitty-gritty is actually pretty simple, a 5 kHz sine wave is generated and output. The peakamp~ object keeps track of the maximum level it’s seen in the past 20 ms and this level is divided by the calibration value. That’s it!

I’m using this as part of a bigger program designed for live performance. I’ll talk more about it as I get closer to finishing it.

I hope a graphic designer burns in hell for this. I wonder how many innocent yogurt buyers have fallen into the Banilla trap as I have. Leaving aside the discussion of the banana+vanilla flavor itself, I can’t imagine how the Banilla packaging design passed through so many layers of approval without anyone thinking, “You know, this looks awfully similar to the vanilla design. A lot of people will probably get confused.” It must be some secret deal between Stonyfield Farm and the banana mafia.

Since it wouldn’t be very productive for me to just sit here complaining, I took it upon myself to redesign the Banilla yogurt packaging. Even if Stonyfield Farm doesn’t use my design, I will still sleep soundly knowing that I did everything I could to correct this grave injustice.

One of the parts of being the production manager at the Gargoyle is getting unsolicited emails from artists and booking agents who want to do a show at our venue. Since we have a dedicated “booking” email address on our site, any time I get an email like that it’s usually not the most professional operation.

Which brings me to the most recent booking inquiry I’ve received. The full email and attached poster:

Subject: Micro Wrestling Federation LIVE @ The Gargoyle!!!

Hello, my name is Miguel.  I work for a pro midget wrestling show called the Micro Wrestling Federation . The Micro event is a full scale WWE type event with a professional size wrestling ring and an all midget cast.

The show is one of a kind and we average 500+ fans per show. I have plenty of references that have had sell outs and I wanted to see if I could talk to someone who does your bookings.

Check out the video clip on the home page of our website below.  You will be able to see about 10 different venues that have had the Micro event in 2008.  You will get a good idea of how the ring is set up and how the crowd stands around the ring.  Also notice the crowd is 50-50 guys and girls.  The people that come and see the Micro event aren’t coming to see wrestling……they are coming to see midgets!  Thanks.

P.S. We were @ the Bar and Nightclub Convention this year and no one had more people visit their booth than us.

Their website is www.microwrestling.com, if you’re interested. I think this is better than our reigning champion of booking inquiries, the Elvis impersonator festival.

So I haven’t been posting all that often recently, but I’m going to try to get back to my 2-3 posts/week goal. -Matt

If you use the internet, you’ve probably seen video demos of new, experimental computer interface devices. The first one to make the rounds way back in 2006 was Jeff Han’s multi-touch display demo. I still consider this the gold standard, both for presentation and for the technology itself. The video is short, blazing through about a dozen applications with no voiceover commentary. This clip also holds a special place in my heart because it was the first video I watched on YouTube, about three years ago. Man, those were the days.

Like the multi-touch, two more recent interface gadgets have gained popularity after being demoed at the TED conference. The first to make the rounds was Siftables, an attempt to free the computer from the two-dimensional confines of a screen by breaking it up into a handful of postage stamp-sized screens, which you then arrange on a two-dimensional surface. But the blocks talk to each other! And they have tilt sensors! Basically they’re the lovechild of a Wiimote and a Tamagotchi. The technology is interesting, but it’s definitely not ready for primetime. The applications shown in the video illustrate what the Siftables are capable of, but in no way revolutionized human-computer interfaces the way the multi-touch demo did. Maybe after a few more years in the lab these could be marketable, but don’t talk to me until they can at least move around on their own. What good is a swarm of minicomputers if you have to arrange them yourself?

The other interface demoed last month at TED was Sixth Sense. This technology is the most mobile experimental interface system I’ve seen so far. It consists of a webcam and a mini-projector, hanging around the operator’s neck in the ultimate display of nerd bling. The projector can display information onto any surface, and the user operates it with hand gestures that the camera captures. It’s still in very early stages of development, but some things about it are big gamechangers. I’m a big fan of integrating displays/information/etc into real life. There have been demos of “augmented reality” before, but they’ve been of a very different nature–seeming to adhere more closely to the science fiction ideas of computer interfaces (i.e. goggles, etc). Sixth Sense is a very creative concept, and while most of the applications they demoed were more whimsical than practical, the underlying technology represents a dramatic shift in how computers fit into the world around us. By simply moving the information into meatspace, computers become social, as opposed to personal, tools.

Final note: the word “computer” is beginning to sound very dated. I guess that’s just one of the final steps toward total ubiquity of a technology.

I know I’ve made fun of Google for being dumb before, but this makes up for it. I just sent an email in the future.

Photos from Urban Camouflage. Thanks to Swissmiss, one of my favorite blogs of the moment.