notesdontmatter

Forum – Week 7 – “Physical Computing (2)”:

This was my most successful week for some time for this subject. The first exercises went smoothly and for once I could hear myself making the desired sounds along with everyone else. The trip back to the Victorian synth was strangely nostalgic…

The toy phone is a difficult one to manipulate however as it seems to respond only to bends being inserted in between its ‘power in’ current path. One must take care if using a nine-volt battery as power because it’s easy to lose focus on the current path and overload the circuit. Seb straightened me out on one exercise where I had incorrectly omitted the phones power from the circuit equation. I had assumed that it would draw power from the Arduino board but this was not the case.

Once this exercise (3) was running correctly, I made a mild addition to the PTAH patch, adding a metro and a switch to cycle through note on and off sequences. This freed up my LDR hand (yes Christian I still have your small LDR, it’s safe), for some musical frequency manipulation set to a rhythmic pulse that could be adjusted with a simple max slider.



Exercise 4 was less of a success in that I never really got the Max patch communicating with the Arduino correctly. Not to worry, the circuit still seemed to provide some interesting sample bending, and this is the example I have provided as an MP3. Some how it was treating the LDR as a trigger for on and off, and a frequency resistor at the same time. This meant I could turn it on with the main switch and then keep things moving when it stopped purely by allowing all light to get to the LDR. Beyond my capacity to explain, but fun to manipulate all the same…

Click here to link to online folder containing the above mentioned MP3.


Reference:

Haines Christian. “Forum – Week 7 – Physical Computing (2).” Workshop presented at the Audio Lab, Level 4, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 6th of September 2007.

Sebastian Tomczak. “Forum – Week 7 – Physical Computing (2).” Workshop presented at the Audio Lab, Level 4, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 6th of September 2007.

posted by David J Dowling @ 8:41 PM