Hybrid Instrument Building 2014

Final Project Milestone 1 – Haochuan Liu

Assignment,Audio,Final Project,OpenCV — haochuan @ 10:28 am

Plan for milestone 1

The plan for milestone 1 is to build the basic system of the drawable stompbox. First, letting the webcam to capture the image of what you have drawn on paper, then the computer can recognize the words on the image. After making a pattern comparison, the openframwork will send a message to puredata via OSC. Puredata will find the right effect which is pre-written in it and add it to your audio/live input.

Here is the technical details of this system:

After writing words on a white paper, the webcam will take a picture of it and then store this photo to cache. The program in OpenFrameworks will load the photo, and turn the word on the photo to a string and store it in the program using optical character recognition via Tesseract. The string will be compared to the Pattern library to see if the stompbox you draw is in the library. If it is, then the program will send a message to let PureData enable this effect via OSC addon. You can use both audio files or live input in puredata, and puredata will add the effect what you have drawn to your sound.

Here are some OCR tests in OF:

About the pattern library on OF:

After a number of test for OCR, the accuracy is pretty high but not perfect. Thus a pattern library is needed to do a better recognition. For example, Tesseract always can not distinguish “i” and “l”, “t” and “f” , and “t” and “l”. So the library will determine what you’ve drawn is “Distortion” when the result after recognition is “Dlstrotlon”, “Disforfion” or “Dislorlion”.

Effects in PureData:

Until now, I’ve made five simple effects in PureData, which are Boost, Tremolo, Delay, Wah, and Distortion.

Here is a video demo of what I’ve done for this project:

Hybrid Instrument Final Project Milestone 1 from Haochuan Liu on Vimeo.

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Final Project Milestone #1—Wanfang Diao

Assignment,Audio,Final Project,Hardware — Wanfang Diao @ 12:26 am

My first milestone is :” Build circuits to make sounds first and then try to the recognition part”.

In the first two week, I tried the circuits to make sound at certain pitch. The circuit I use is the 555 timer circuits, by changing the resistor, the frequency of the signal of out put can be changed.

After building the below circuits successfully on bread board, the sound is not perfect, I add a low pass filter but it helps little. So I plan to solve this problem by mechanical way.

2013-10-28 21.09.39 2

I soldering the circuits on proto board and add photo sensor and a switch. The photo sensor is in order to support the idea that by changing the cube’s up-face to change cube mode (i.e. # b ). As show in the video below, I also try to use different material covering on the speaker to get better audio effect. I’ll also keep trying other kinds of circuits to solve this.

About battery: the size of battery will limits my cubes size, so I plan to use use this one: www.sparkfun.com/products/341

2013-10-28 21.17.07 from Wanfang Diao on Vimeo.

Material

I have laser cut a wooden cube which is 5.5cm*5.5cm*5.5cm, but I feel the material is not cute enough.

So I plan to try more flexible materiel like image below which is silicone. I want the cube to feel like jelly.

I also realize that before I design the mother mold for silicone cube I have to decide the final electronic part design.

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‘SketchSynth’ by Billy Keyes

Audio,Instrument,Reference — haochuan @ 12:45 am

SketchSynth: A Drawable OSC Control Surface

SketchSynth lets anyone create their own control panels with just a marker and a piece of paper. Once drawn, the controller sends Open Sound Control (OSC) messages to anything that can receive them; in this case, a simple synthesizer running in Pure Data. It’s a fun toy that also demonstrates the possibilities of adding digital interaction to sketched or otherwise non-digital interfaces.

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Final Project Proposal: Haochuan Liu

Assignment,Audio,Instrument,Reference,Submission — haochuan @ 12:39 am

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Audio Graffiti and Music in Motion: Location Based + Spatial Sound

Artists,Audio,Hardware,Machine Vision,Max,OpenCV,Reference,Software,Technique — Ali Momeni @ 2:46 pm

Some impressive spatial audio examples/works by Zack Settle and company. See Zack’s page for more…

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Group Project: Multi-Channel Sound System (part 1)

Audio,Hardware,Instrument,Reference,Software — rkotcher @ 4:23 pm

Introduction:

The multi-channel sound system group is implementing a spatial instrument that allows us to interactively experience sound in space. The system includes software that controls a set of eight (currently) speakers that are positioned in space. The experiences will depend on the specific hardware setup and mechanics, which are still in the works. Our group has listed five possible hardware/software setups, and we are brainstorming the many experiences we can create with each setup. These ideas are listed in the section “Categories”.

Categories:

Each section corresponds to a specific hardware/software setup. For each, we include a few ideas that we have come up with so far.

A mobile disk that can be worn (as a hat, etc) – “Ambiance Capture Headset/Scenes from a Memory”

Every day, we move about from place-to-place to spend our time as driven by our motivations. Home, Road/Car, Office/School, Library, Park, Cafeteria, Bar, Nightclub, Friend’s place, Quite Night- we all experience a different ambiance around us and a change of environment is usually a good thing. It may soothe us, or trigger a certain personal mode we have (like a work mode, a social mode or a party mode). What if we could capture this ambiance, in a ‘personalized’ way and create this around us when we want- introducing the Ambiance Capture Headset. This headset has a microphone array around it and it records all the audio around you- it may catalog this audio using GPS data. You come home, connect the headset to your laptop & an 8-speaker circle and after processing audio (extracting ambiance only, using differences in amplitude and correlation in time etc.), the system lets you choose the ambiance you’d want. You can quickly recall your day by sweeping through and re-experiencing where you’ve been.

Head-sized disk with speakers positioned evenly around the disk. Facing inward – “Circle of Confusion”

In this section, our ideas tend to fall in two categories, either using the setup to confuse a listener’s perception of the world around them, or to enhance it in some way. In the first scenario, one idea is to amplify sounds that are occurring at 180 degrees from the speaker, in other words, experiencing a sonic environment that is essentially reversed from reality.

Speakers hanging from the ceiling in arbitrary shapes – “EARS”

Sometimes you just need someone to listen to you, like a few ears to hear you out maybe? A secret, a desire, an idea, a confession. This is a setup that connects with people, and let’s them express what they want. It’s a room you walk into which has speakers suspended from the ceiling. You raise your hand towards one, and when that speaker senses you coming near, it descends to your mouth level so you may talk/whisper into it (speakers can act as microphones as well! or we may attach a mic to each). You may tell different things to the different speakers, and once you’ve said all you want, you hear what the speakers have heard before. This is chosen by the current position of speakers, as all speakers start to descend if you try to touch them. All voices are coded, like through a vocoder to protect identities of people. Hearing some more wishes, problems, inspirations, hopes you probably feel lighter than you did before.

A 3D setup (perhaps a globe-shaped setup) – “World Cut”

You enter into an 8 speaker circle, having a globe in front. You spin the globe and input a particular planar intersection of the world- this planar intersection ‘cuts’/intersects a number of countries/locations. These intersected locations map to a corresponding direction in our circle, so you hear music/voices/languages from the whole ‘cut’ at a go in out 8 speaker circle. You can spin the globe and explore the world in the most peculiar of ways.

Current system setup

The diagram shows the current hardware setup. As we explain in the section below, it is subject to minor modifications.

p2-500

Implementing a STABLE and ROBUST system for practical use:

The current hardware implementation is not practical, yet. The wiring obstructs the experience and the system itself is difficult to transport. The items in the section called “Categories” describes completely new hardware setups that will fix this problem. Shielded speaker wires or PCB boards may be part of a more stable. Making the project more robust could include making acrylic enclosures for the speakers. Finally, we’re looking into using larger speakers to improve the experience.

Initial Group Members:

Sean Lee

David E. Lu

Jake Jae Wook Lee

M Haris Usmani

Current Group Members:

M Haris Usmani (Persistent Member)

Robert Kotcher

Haochuan Liu

Liang He

Meng Shi

Wanfang Diao

Jake Berntsen

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Assignment 2 “Musical Painting” by Wanfang & Meng(2013)

Assignment,Audio,Instrument,Max,Reference,Sensors,Submission — Wanfang Diao @ 9:54 pm

Our idea begins from traditional Chinese Painting, painting lines express a feeling of strength and rhythm concisely. Our work tries to transfer the beauty of painting to music. However, I found that making a harmonious”sound” from people’s easy input from 9 photosensors is not as easy as I thought. I tried some “chord”，like C mA D and so on. It helps a little bit…The final result is in the vedio in Vimeo.

I know there are pretty work to improve the “algorithm”. Although, not sound really like music, I think the value of the work is that we try to break the line between sound and light, and see what happens.

In order to find a improvement way, I observed several other interactive musical instruments works, I think maybe using some basic rhythm pieces play repeatedly and only changing the chords as interactive elements is a way of improvement of this work.

The technology we used are photo sensors and arduino and Max.

assignment1 1 from Wanfang Diao on Vimeo.

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