Experiment 1: in which a live video is streamed and gibberish is heard

Blatantly not been updating this here, mainly due to watching far too many Rodney Mullen videos on youtube over the past couple of weeks. However, I have been doing stuff, and stuff.

Here is some of it.



This is a test patch I've made in PureData for one of a pair of installations I'm aiming to put on in college at the open house day next week. At the moment it's called 'Catchphrase', after the BBC learn-Welsh podcast many of the samples are from.

Audio samples containing an instruction, suggestion or Welsh-based fact are set off at random intervals between 3 and 9 seconds. Meanwhile, a gem window detects movement in front of a fixed camera, tracking the image's centre of gravity. This tracker sets off letters from the Welsh alphabet (ordered from right to left in the above video, but left to right for the user), banging out a midi note in Logic at the same time. The alphabet-samples are pitchshifted higher if the movement is at the top of the screen, and lower as the centre of gravity moves further towards the bottom. Oh, and there's a bit of reverb and delay. And the next alphabet-sample won't get set off until the one before it has finished (it just got silly otherwise). And, err.. that's it.

It's not fantastically musical or anything, but it has a certain level of interaction, and given another week will hopefully be quite good, and also fun for people to wander past in the CMT corridor.

More experiments and, eventually, finished business to follow. Also, we absolutely have to video the boomwhacker piece and get that shit on youtube.

(edit - good lord, that video really doesn't need to be 3 minutes long, does it?)

2 comments:

  1. How *would* you greet a lady called Rhiannon in the morning?

    ReplyDelete
  2. with a big sloppy kiss and a plate of fried eggs, obv.

    ReplyDelete