Performance Based Musicmaking prototypes from Wout Standaert on Vimeo.

This weekend I also went to a kickass workshop in KC België (Hasselt) that was about circuitbending, chiptune, and everything related. We (Jim Bollansée, Danny Leen, Tom Luyten, Peter Briers, Ruud Denivel, Olivier Berger and me) got our very own private workshop from Jethro Volders (The Rottchilds, El Guapo Stuntteam) to create visuals for the The Vermin Twins (Lotte Vanhamel – Micha Volders (The Sore Losers, El Guapo Stuntteam)) performance at the end of the workshop.

We followed a tutorial made by little-scale (Sebastian Tomczak) about hacking VGA plugs to send out RGB signals of your own via an Arduino.

More info and a video after the break!

First we tried the one using MIDI, where we reused my FFT PD patch to analyse sound coming in and to send appropriate OSC messages to a Max patch which had a serial connection with the Arduino. This whole string of events of course, caused a great deal of latency.

Then Jim said something along the lines of “let’s try the other tutorial where the audio data is coming right into the arduino” and this one was much more responsive. It was also less chaotic and really felt connected to the music. Awesomeness ensued by blaring Mr. Oizo’s flat beat or no day massacre through the system and seeing those fat bass lines create fat lines on the screen.

We then bought a VGA splitter that allowed us to send the signal to 8 CRT monitors and made some color-switching VGA plugs to get some different colors. We also had a big projection running of Tom’s audio-analysing-fluid-dynamics Processing sketch.

The staccato 8-bit square wave elements and sweeping atari basslines in the music of the twins had great effect on the visuals, we were constantly looking at eachother saying “how awesome is this!”. I hope they decide to do a follow-up on this stuff because it was too cool for words. Too cool for school!

Olivier took some video’s with his camera and edited them all together for your enjoyment! Also check out the post on the Vermin Twins blog.

Edit: Tom blogged about this too.

Workshop Zaal België from Oliver Begaz on Vimeo.

Expect source code of my projects and additional files available for download soon.

So we’re almost there! In the meanwhile, you can download the final version of my thesis here (in Dutch).

Take a look at the youtube movies, the 3D tracking seems to work quite well.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/
http://www.youtube.com/xboxprojectnatal

In other news, SoftKinetic, a Belgian company, has also devised a similar system that lets you make controllerless gestures to control your TV.

Anyway, here’s a video where I show these 5 quick test gestures; “Circle”, “Square”, “Z”, “Triangle” and “Tennis”. A musician will be able to choose his own gestures and his own events connected to those gestures so he can control his music without having to hide behind his computer.

Wiimote Gesture recognition with WiiGee from Wout Standaert on Vimeo.

The next step is using 4 wiimotes for gesture recognition. Then the movements made will hopefully have a higher rate of recognition. Now it has a 90% success rate or so.

Training of the gestures works smoothly, and recognition is fast, but it’s sometimes a bit off when you’ve overtrained a gesture or when it was not precisely trained. Then it will recognize every movement as that particular gesture. But overall it works very fast and I’m curious to how it will perform with multiple wiimotes.

It sounds a bit like a lawnmower now, so I’m still in the process of tweaking the sound a bit.

“Ugh, that is a weird glitch. I’d agree that it’s not buffer underrun. It
probably has something to do with the particular version of Java you are
using on your particular macbook. My understanding is that Apple has not
been very good about keeping the JVM for macs in good shape.”

Also, I got some proper sound out of it after I started up Ableton Live to record the glitch. But as mysteriously as it got fixed, it got broken again. Maybe I should switch to a windows system for this prototype. Or Pure Data, I haven’t decided yet.