What You See is What You Hear

Visualizing Algorithmic Music with Hardware

I’m building a project for this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire. I’ve been thinking about this project for a long time. It is composed of a matrix addressed set of 256 LED’s and small speakers. Nothing new about using matrix addressing for LED’s, but speakers?

I’m using a PIC microcontroller to address the array. I will also demonstrate the use of an Arduino Mega to drive this type of display.

I was curious about what would happen and what would be perceived when the sound and light pattern were produced by the same sound and light array.

I’m coding various ways to program the array. The first method I’m using is an idea called one-line algorithmic music. There is a loose group of international enthusiasts who experiment with this method for generating sound.

In a spin on this idea in 2011, a Finish developer, called Viznut, posted videos which caught my interest including this site. http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/algorithmic-symphonies-from-one-line-of.html
Visnut and another developer, Bemmu, created a web-based platform to explore these algorithms: http://wurstcaptures.untergrund.net/music/

I’m also coding some other ideas based on iterative functions. These can reveal some interesting complexity in sound and light patterns.

Hello,

It has been a long time since posting here. It’s been a busy time for Sally and I.

Sally and I have moved to Oakland Ca.

I moved to the Bay Area in July of 2017 to join Openwater, a start-up in San Francisco, researching medical imaging using ultrasound and holography.

Meanwhile, Sally produced a solo exhibition for the Butler Institute of Art, shown from January through July, 2018, (www.sallyweber.com), and she anticipates completing a public art commission in 2019. From February 2018 on, Sally began the delightful tasks of prepping the house and studio for sale and decommissioning half of our worldly goods to other needy souls by way of a massive moving sale (thank you Carl) – Bless their acquiring hearts.

In late 2017 I landed in a section of Oakland called Jingletown, bordering the estuary between Oakland and Alameda. Sally and Koko, our dog, joined me in July via our car and trailer trek across the country. We knew we had really returned to California when we were surrounded by the rolling hills with scattered live oak trees and a ruby sunset over the Bay.

With most of our stuff in storage, the process began to find studio space in earnest. A harrowing task here. In Jingletown, Sally met the community though its dogs (and their owners). One evening Sally and Koko met a gleeful woman and her dog. The woman had just retired and planned to move to Portugal. She was preparing to put her live/work space of 20 years, on the market. OMG!! Angels sang – and the race was on.

We made a deal on the building and moved all our stuff from storage units. We now have a big workspace with a corner of it dedicated to my shop. Ahh! Someday we will have everything unpacked.

I’ve started work on a new project for Maker Faire in San Mateo which I will describe in the next post.

Cheers!

Craig

Here is a short video about my human powered spin art machine that I made for the 2016 East Austin Studio Tour.  After making various geometric drawing machines for people to play with, I thought I would make something that depended more on chaos and happenstance.

People seem to enjoy it.

The paint I used is a 4:1 mixture of Minwax acrylic varnish and a bulk Epson printer ink from InkXpress.com

Ill make a longer video after the tour is done.

Cheers,

Craig

One more drawing machine.  I’ve wanted to build one for a while, based on an article in the Boy Mechanic, dated 1913.

Download the book here. Look on page 436.

This one is a mash-up of two of the designs in the original article.   Come see it at the 2015 East Austin Studio Tour in November!

Cheers!

I’m thrilled to be invited to the Gathering for Gardner in Atlanta this coming week.

An interesting meeting led to an invitation to this great event.  I had heard about the organization but never thought I could attend.

The Gathering is named for Martin Gardner was a popular science and mathematics writer. He had a column in Scientific American magazine called Mathematical Games.  My father and I looked forward to this column and the Amateur Scientist  articles.

The theme of the G4G conference this year is the work of John Horton Conway.    He came up with a fascinating thing called  the Game of Life based on the idea of the Cellular Automaton.

A popular open source version of this game can be found on the Golly website.

A good source for initial patterns for Life can be found here.

I’m making a hologram for the event, of a life pattern in 3D by creating a pointcloud where the x and y are the normal 2D Life plane and the third, Z direction is time.

Here is a 2D hint at what the hologram will look like.  I rarely mention my day Job on my blog.  Its Zebra Imaging, Inc.  We are currently expanding our stock image page.  Send a note to Zebra if you would like to see this image on the stock image page.