"from everything a little bit"
August 15th, 2010

Interactive Balafon @ DIY Music Day

A couple of videos of my Interactive Balafon at DIY Music Day 2010. The balafon is a type of wooden marimba from West Africa (here is a great video of a balafon solo). The World Museum Liverpool has one as part of its collection but visitors aren’t allowed to play it. This interactive piece enables people to explore the balafon using their bodies in space. Developed for DIY Music Day 2010 using Isadora, in the same way as my bells and glockenspiel pieces. Isadora allows peoples’ movement in front of the camera (hidden at the base of screen) to be tracked and then to trigger corresponding video clips of notes being played.

August 15th, 2010

DIY Music Day photos

Photos from the day. Unfortunately these are only from the 3rd floor room where myself and cybersonica were stationed. We didn’t really get chance to look at all the other stuff going on, but it was, by all accounts, a great day. Really interesting to be part of a group of musicians, artists and makers with varied approaches to making sound. And great to work within a family friendly space such as the museum.

These pictures mainly show museum assistants and families exploring my interactive wooden xylophone (or ‘balafon’ as it is natively called). Also a couple of Lewis Sykes of Cybersonica and his table of noise toys. Will post video soon.

August 13th, 2010

Interactive Instruments #3: wooden percussion

Video of me testing a piece I have developed in Isadora for the DIY Music Day tomorrow. I will be able to calibrate it a bit better once I’m in the space, but for now its look good and should work really well once its displayed 10ft wide.

The day has been organised by Ross Dalziel (soundnetwork) and has loads of live music and activities taking place, including thumb piano workshops, arduino, and Octopus in the aquarium.
its free, its on all day.
May 22nd, 2010

Moves Opening Night

Photo documentation of the Moves 10 launch in April where I performed a VJ set alongside sound scientist Tom Rea Smith (Amos) and TV Lux man Tristan Brady-Jacobs. It’s really nice to see how it looked to the audience, especially the Tangram-making section, which I couldn’t see at all due to my wrestling with those darn puzzles. Photos by Garth of safetycatch.net

March 18th, 2010

Framing Motion

I’ve been waiting patiently for the press launch before I could put this one up. Here is the trailer I made for Moves 2010 International Festival of Movement On Screen. The theme of the festival is ‘Framing Motion’. The logo is by Smiling Wolf. And the festival takes place from 21st – 25th April in Liverpool and across the UK.

I was asked to create a piece of “artwork”, and whilst ultimately this is a just simple sting for a festival, the openness of that brief allowed me to explore my practice of using live layered feedback to create much more organic forms and movements. It may not look so slick, but its an achievement for me personally as I’m not a motion graphics designer. Instead of using After Effects or Motion (which scare me I’m ashamed to admit) I used the tools I do know: live camera feedback and Isadora.

The theme of Framing Motion was an interesting one for me to play with, as it is about the context in which movement occurs. With this video i tried to merge the movement and its context through the use of a feedback loop, in which the ‘frame’ of the image is a central visual element rather than a peripheral one.

This is not a straight forward feedback loop either – I was able to isolate changes in the image (‘difference’) and re-inject these back into the animation, but with changing tints. So what we see are essentially the movements between frames, rather than the direct content of the frames. The things we see are the things we can’t see. Apologies I’m babbling.

The sound, a track called ‘Palindromes’, was by my good friend and sonic structuralist Amos. As the name implies, the track is structured so it sounds the same forwards as backwards. This encouraged me to make both an intro and an outro video sting, but I’ve only put the intro one up here.

Anyway, cheers to Gala at Moves for giving me a stab at this. Thankyou to Tom for the excellent music. Will hopefully be creating some live VJ mixes during the festival alongside Tristan “TV Lux” Brady-Jacobs. Be sure to come and enjoy!

February 19th, 2010

Work in progress: Bells

A further experiment in colourful reactive percussion, this time using these beautiful handbells. The isadora patch uses the eyes actor to track movement in a specific area of the camera in order to trigger each bell. Eventually it will be triggered by kids jumping up an down.

by Sam | Posted in Interactive | No Comments » | Tags: , ,
January 24th, 2010

Work in progress: Glockenspiel


A small playful AV experiment: A video glockenspiel adapted for interaction using Isadora. Notes can be triggered by key numbers 1-8, by midi triggers, or even just moving in-front of a webcam. Notes can be played singlularly or all at once.

November 24th, 2009

‘A nail, its hammer, and the concrete’

Images from Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival where Sarah Nicolls performed 3 experimental compositions by Michel van der Aa (‘Transit’), Atau Tanaka (‘new work for pianist and sensors’), and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (‘Un clou, son marteau, et le béton’). I was lucky to be working with Sarah in presenting Pierre Alexandre Tremblay’s composition, and expressing it visually through the use of reactive lighting.

Sarah had originally asked me to change the atmosphere of the space using multiple screens and projections, but this wasn’t possible due to the numbers in the audience. Being restricted to a more traditional audience layout, eventually my thinking turned to how lights would help to make the experience more immersive. I settled on the image of huge icicles, or stalactites that would add an architectural dimension to the lighting, both channelling colour into physical space and then softly radiating light outwards to change the general atmosphere. The 6 giant tracing paper icicles (tracing paper rolls are very cheap and therefore idea for theatre) were hung from 6 LED Par cans, arranged on the periphery of the performance space so the audience would feel encapsulated, but not distracted.

Sarah’s performance used a mixture of sound cues and MaxMSP midi signals which were fed to me from her laptop, and then I brought them into my Isadora patch, which then sent them out to a LanBox and so on to the lights. It allowed for extremely sharp changes in lighting states to occur in an instant as triggered by the MaxMSP patch, meaning that Sarah’s performance was truly linked to the lighting, triggering changes in the atmosphere. This felt fitting as a lot of Sarah’s work is an investigation into the way technology becomes an extension of the pianist in the context performance. The other two pieces performed that afternoon, a film soundtrack, and a sensor-led piece based on electrical signals in the pianists muscles, further developed the theme

June 6th, 2009

The Huge Entity – video document

Having spent much time already wondering whether something exists if it isn’t documented, I must admit I didn’ t take the chance of my work not existing and so I had it filmed.  Here is the video of The Huge Entity installation being used by amused passers-by. What video can do is communicate effectively (more effectively than my writing anyway) how a piece actually works. Thanks to Neringa for making the film.

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