Well, that didn’t take very long.
Filmmaker Ryan Varga made this short documentary about maker culture, filmed at the very recent Toronto Mini Maker Faire. See if you can spot all the Site 3 members!
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged diy, making, mini maker faire toronto, ryan varga, site 3 Leave a comment
This weekend, Site 3 and the Treehouse Group held the first ever Toronto Mini Maker Faire:
“Toronto Mini Maker Faire is the ultimate celebration of making, crafting, DIY-ing, tinkering, hacking and sharing. It’s a weekend where makers of all kinds will show off their projects and hold how-to workshops, with hands-on activities for all ages. Exhibits on display will include robots, laser cutting, letterpress printing, a 3D print gallery and kinetic sculptures.”
It was a great time and a big hit! Thousands of people came to the Evergreen Brickworks in Toronto to check out the projects and creations on display. Here are a few pictures that I took.
More on Flickr!
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Here’s another piece from the Elektra Festival!
The Cycloid-E is a sort of multi-pendulum with five segments, one connected to the other, each with a sound system in it. As the central segment moves, it induces chaotic oscillations in the other segments, and emits all sorts of strange and exciting sounds. At the festival it was set up in this huge reverberant room that really complemented all the eerie noises it was making.
Zoom!
Zip!
This week I’ve been checking out the Elektra Festival in Montreal. It’s a celebration of electronic/digital art and media. So far it’s been pretty great!
One of the especially cool pieces here is the Daredroid. It’s a dress that mixes a cocktail for you in exchange for a round of Truth or Dare. It was designed by Anouk Wipprecht, Jane Tingley, and Marius Kintel.
If you answer your Truth correctly, or perform the requisite Dare, you get a tasty drink. You can even choose to ‘Make it dirty’ if you’re really adventurous.
The dress uses medical pumps normally used to administer precise dosages of drugs to patients.
All in all, it’s really fun! You get to giggle nervously and a pretty robot girl talks to you! Perfect!
CBS Morning reports on Pat Metheney’s robotic musical accompaniment, much of which was made by Eric Singer and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR). I interned with LEMUR while many of the pieces in this band were being made, all the way back in 2009. It’s great to see everything in action.
An andantephone is an instrument that allows a player to step through the notes of a song as if they were walking along its timeline. Most andantephones (so far) consist of a series of tiles, one tile for each note in a song. A player can walk from tile to tile, actuating the notes with their feet, and literally walk through the song, note by note.
Here’s a single andantephone tile from the latest incarnation of the instrument:
I designed and built this andantephone recently with Prof. Steve Mann and Ryan Janzen at UofT. This latest design incorporates a pair of complementary sensors to sense a high dynamic range of seismic vibrations in the tiles. The seismic vibrations are turned into musical notes by a device called a frequency shifter. This does just what you would think – it takes a signal and shifts its frequency to a desired target frequency. That way we can take signals that don’t normally have a discernibly musical pitch and turn them into notes. By capturing a wide range of physical input, we created an instrument that reacts very sensitively and intuitively to a player’s motion.
Steve, Ryan, and I wrote a paper on high dynamic range sensing as embodied in an andantephone for Tangible, Embedded Interaction (TEI) 2011. We demoed several of these tiles at the conference in Portugal in January.
Things get interesting when you start playing with different tile arrangements and patterns, as well as how you traverse the tiles. Ryan wrote and performed a composition specifically for the Andantephone, entitled Stray. He also wrote a paper on it.
The tiles are made from a pair of aluminium plates sandwiching the sensors, the cables for which can be seen snaking out from between the plates. The material used as a spring is a squishy, pourable, silicone. The bolts in each of the corners keep the plates aligned relative to one another, but can move up and down, permitting the squishing of the sensors.
For more andantephones and performance/play videos see http://wearcam.org/andantephone/
Posted in Projects Tagged andantephone, music, musical instruments, ryan janzen, steve mann, stray, tei Leave a comment
Check out my latest stereo tube amp! Except for the knobs and paint, it was built entirely from the parts included in my fabulous Hobgob Stereo Tube Amp Kit, which is based on the circuit for poindexter’s Musical Machine. Just like the kit, it’s a push-pull amp that uses 6V6 tubes to give you about 5W (more than enough if you use it right!) of output power to play with.
It’s got sort of an Eddie Van Halen/Jackson Pollock thing going on. I had toyed with the idea of building a shiny black acrylic case for it, but as it turns out, splattering paint around is much more fun than fiddling with acrylic solvent. I’ll save that idea for a future amp. I’m also thinking that the overall purty-ness could be improved with some similarly splattery cans over the transformers.
If you’re interested in owning this amp or purchasing an assembled Stereo Tube Amp Kit, let me know and we will work something out!
The guts (schematics here):
Look how nice it is!
I can only assume that by this point you are throwing your money at your computer screen in a fit of desire for one of these tube amp kits. Go ahead, indulge yourself, live a little!
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Very nice BeatSneaks-like project from Didier Brun for Adidas:
Sweet moves. Coincidentally, I actually constructed a very similar device last year, using many of the same tools: XBee radios, force-sensitive resistors, and Processing. Here are some pictures of that prototype:
There’s some hardware debouncing on the module there, and then the XBees and Processing handle the rest.
I moved away from the project for a while, but lately I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit and have some interesting improvements in mind. Stay tuned for more in the future!
Had to post this when I saw it on boingboing:
“Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was the co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a sound effects and music studio established in the 1950s that had a vast influence on electronic music and synthesizer technology.”
She made all sorts of gigantic, messy synthesizers full of vacuum tubes and dangerously high voltages and called them Oramics.
It looks like someone at the London Science Museum got their hands on one and is putting together a replica. The video below contains some pretty interesting, spooky sounds made by her machines.
Many of them seem to use optical input. The composer literally draws the waveform of the music on a piece of transparent film – sort of like a continuous optical music box.
Here’s one of Daphne’s compositions. It’s pretty eerie:
There’s more at daphneoram.org!