Site prototype 2 / Workshop Open Circuit

So, what I’m currently working on is a website for my prototype 2, a wiimote gestural MIDI/OSC controller made in the scope of my master’s thesis. The site will feature some explanation about the concept and source code for anyone interested in using it/developing it further.

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.

Tags: Ableton Live, Chiptune, Circuit bending, Processing, Pure Data, VGA

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 20:55 and is filed under Workshops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.