The Minim as well as the Ess library, how great they might be, both produce really strange glitchy sounds that aren’t part of the waveforms. Currently thinking of switching to Pure Data for the synthesizer.
In other news, I’ve checked out gesture recognition with wiimotes. There’s a java library that focuses on this, WiiGee, but it doesn’t support multiple wiimotes — edit: it does. So I’m checking out Hidden markov models and their use in gesture recognition. Since this is computer science stuff it’s a bit over my head…
I’ll keep you posted! The waveshaping synth prototype should be finished soon.
I’m probably going to translate this entire blog into English soon. It started out as Dutch, but I want it to be internationally available. Another reason to stay tuned…
I made some applications in Processing to further investigate the wiimotes, and how they react to different movements. I’m using all of the indications of movement possible with the wiimote (except for the IR camera, for freedom of movement); Pitch, Roll, Yaw, overall Acceleration (these are calculated by OSCulator) and also the raw X,Y,Z accelerations.
While waving the wiimotes around I noticed some things. If you’re making round movements, the graphs become a fluent curve, almost a sinewave sometimes. If you’re moving really wildly, it gets closer to a sawtooth or pulse wave. This made me thinking that maybe the most direct connection between your movements and the sound that you produce, is through these waves that you draw. The “buffer” above is 500 samples long. In a second of “CD quality” sound there go 44100 samples. So if you repeat one of these waveforms 88,2 times per second in an oscillator, you undoubtedly would get a very “own” sound.
This is definitely something I’m going to explore, I can barely wait!
This weekend we were invited with a couple of C-md students for a workshop in the Flemish culture centre de Brakke Grond in Amsterdam, at the same moment that Eric Joris and CREW were residing there. The workshop was about gaming and physical input / physical computing with technologies as Arduino and the game-engine Unity. Just the thing for us, so we (Danny Leen, Tom Luyten, Jim Bollansée and me) packed our bags and set up our camp in Amsterdam.
It was great being able to work with this group of people again because for starters, working together with Tom had been way too long ago, and because we’re usually very concerned with what the final product will be and stimulate eachother in pushing the borders just that little further. Somehow we succeeded in working every day up until midnight, justified by the fact that me and Jim were doing some volunteering (”buddying”) for Crew (and the volunteering always ended at midnight). So the others stayed out of solidarity, and since we had nothing better to do, we worked on our project.
Looking back, it was still a relatively short period of time to get used to working in Unity and to come up with a good concept. The first day was just spent on fooling around with Unity until something came out.
We also decided not to use the Arduino boards, because Jim and I had already done that enough to be able to learn something new about Arduino during the workshop. Also because I brought my Wiimotes with me, we decided to use a wiimote and connect it to Unity via OSC.
We all pretty quickly agreed to make an “artgame”, a game without a goal, without an ending, but only with a visual/audible style purely for seeing and hearing (and interacting).
Update: Jim, Tom, and Liesbeth (one of our teachers) have also blogged about this.
This tuesday I ordered them at conrad.be, on thursday the order was confirmed and on friday they arrived!
The batteries were included (thank you Nintendo!), so I could start immediatly with connecting them to my computer. I bought a little program for this, called OSCulator ($ 19). The wiimotes use bluetooth, so they’re wireless up to about ten metres. The total price was € 166 for all four of them.
Danny (3 C-md) sent me an interesting video today, about the CCRMA, where they do research for new musical instruments using computers (and wiimotes!). Also a little bit about the SLOrk (Stanford Laptop Orchestra), who certainly use a laptop in an expressive way.
Also included in the video is a little feature about making a G-force sensor using a wii Nunchuk and an Arduino.
I’ve decided to use this blog as my official thesisblog. Which means that on this blog I’ll keep you posted on how my expressive laptop-music-instrument is doing.
For those that don’t know yet, my thesis is about (see title) Performance Based Musicmaking. I created the subject because I noticed that music performers using laptops for generating their sound were usually ignoring the much larger possibilities of a laptop. Like the possibility of reading out one’s body movements and generating music from that. Which is exactly what I’m going to do.
My goal is creating a musical instrument controlled by 4 Wiimotes. The wiimotes are the remote-shaped controllers of the Nintendo Wii, and you can connect these very easily to your computer or laptop by bluetooth. In the controller there are a couple of movement sensors (accelerometers) and an infrared camera for tracking IR-leds. So the price of 35-40 euros is very cheap for what’s there to use.
So, 4 wiimotes, two for the arms, two for the legs. The bluetooth technology also makes them wireless, which enables the musician to move freely on stage while expressing themselves with movement. This is not only for them a more expressive experience, also the audience gets that extra visual information and feeling from the musician.
There’s plenty of software that you can control using these wiimotes, because they can send OSC and Midi signals, to control virtually any audio application out there. I’ve done some first experiments with the wiimotes and now I’m up to writing my own software in Pure Data or Processing to connect the wiimotes to another audio application.
