Torn Paper Effect (Photoshop)

I've just finished a flyer for a band I used to play with in Padova using this Photoshop tutorial for creating a realistic torn paper effect. Very handy indeed and the result is great. I've wanted to known how to do this for years.

Here's a video of us playing at Ferrara Busker's Festival 2010. It runs for a week every August. Well worth checking out.

Arduino Workshop

I attended a great, albeit short, Arduino workshop today with Sylvain Delbart, a graduate of the Masters in Music Technology here at UL. Having done a research project on Arduino in Semester 1, I was familiar with the hardware and software and had already done a few small projects. I picked up a lot of useful tips from Sylvain today and set up a a potentiometer and a proximity sensor to input values into Arduino that were fed into Max MSP and used to control the pitch and volume of a sine wave. A valuable experience..

Here are a few images of the setup and a short video of the Arduino/Max setup in action:

Seminar on Space and Place in New Environments

Ti and Alan presented their seminar today as part of the Principles of Interactive Design module. They discussed various public digital art installations, responsive architecture and the future of digital advertising in cities. I picked up a few nice leads that will be useful for my final year project too! Well done guys!

Some More Sketches for Sensory Garden

Sensory Garden Proposal

Our group had a meeting today to finalise our proposal for Monday 21st. Our proposal includes two zen gardens, a rain chain water feature, a creeper plant to climb the lamp post, two slate drawing areas, a selection of herbs and healing plants, mirror balls of various sizes and a series of coloured flags. We are also proposing to construct a bamboo fence on two sides of the garden to provide shelter and to make the space more intimate.

Masters Final Project

I had a chat today with course director Mikael Fernstrom regarding my final project. I will be submitting a revised proposal this week and posting details here soon. I'm much happier with my slightly altered direction. Updates soon...

Some Mock-ups for the Sensory Garden

Our group will be presenting our proposals for the sensory garden at the end of this week/start of next week. I really need to get hold of a scanner so I can start uploading sketches, and the like. The one in our lab doesn't seem to be functioning (hint, hint, Mikael!). Here are a few ideas in done in PS.

A series of long, tapered flags base on the colour wheel to be installed in the flower beds:

We are also working with the idea of having large sheets of slate for drawing on with chalk:

More to follow...

Seminar on Various User Interfaces

Today Megan O' Flynn and I presented our seminar on various user interfaces for our "Principles of Interactive Design" module. The side show is available for viewing here:

http://www.slideshare.net/gobletcell/various-user-interfaces

Up next week are Alan and Ti with their seminar on "Space and Place in New Environments": looking forward to that...

Video Walkthrough of Bawnmore Garden

Bawnmore Sensory Garden measurements

On Saturday I went out to Bawnmore with some members of the project group to take a look at the space we are going to be working with. `the first thing that hit me was how exposed it is. There is no shelter and it was a particularly windy day. This is an issue we are going to have to deal with when designing any auditory elements. Here's a plan of the garden with dimensions included:

At the end of this week we will present our ideas and move ahead with the nitty gritty of producing the installations.

The Sea Organ - A Musical Instrument played by the Sea

I was reminded of this during a class today. I've been there twice; it's a beautiful spot and a fantastic installation. As part of the iMedia course I will be involved in designing a Sensory Garden at the Bawnmore Centre in Limerick.


http://www.oddmusic.com/gallery/om24550.html

"The musical Sea Organ (morske orgulje) is located on the shores of Zadar, Croatia, and is the world’s first musical pipe organs that is played by the sea. Simple and elegant steps, carved in white stone, were built on the quayside. Underneath, there are 35 musically tuned tubes with whistle openings on the sidewalk. The movement of the sea pushes air through, and – depending on the size and velocity of the wave – musical chords are played. The waves create random harmonic sounds."

Flash Jet Fighter game - work in progress

I'm working on a simple game in Flash at the moment. It consists of a user controlled jet which fires bullets at enemy jets that appear randomly. If the user is hit by an enemy X number of times the game is over. 10 points for every enemy destroyed! I haven't got the scoring working properly yet. I must also figure out how to get the enemies to shoot.

Flash is actually a much nicer drawing tool than I have been giving it credit for all these years:

Strange Attractor at the Crawford Art Gallery

I went to this performance today in Cork: "Strange Attractor is a dynamic multi-dimensional series of collaborative ventures between five artists, Anthony Kelly, Danny McCarthy, Irene Murphy, Mick O’Shea and David Stalling.". There were many, many hacked gadgets and toys, lots of effects pedals and loop stations and a couple of harps among other bit and pieces yet the overall soundscapes produced consisted of teeny, tiny sounds (at least when I was there). This was a four hour performance so depending on what time you went there you could have a totally different experience. In 2008 I took part, with the Mersk Collective, in the yearly Sonic Vigil at St. Finbarr's Cathedral Cork which is a day-long event along the same lines as the performance at the Crawford. Here's a short video I took today. I was trying to figure out the controls/settings as I was shooting so excuse the shaking/blurriness.

Tod Machover and Dan Ellsey play new music

Tod Machover is head of the Media Lab's Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future (MIT) and has been developing technology that allows disabled people to compose and perform their own music. View this video from around 10:50 to hear Tod talk about the interface Hyperscore and to hear/see a performance by Dan Ellsey. Off to find out more about the tech used and the whole project in general now ...

Flash audio visualizer using ActionScript 3.0

For my final project I'm going to need to generate graphics based on user input using sensors that may detect motion, heat, sound, etc. Today I've been working with ActionScript 3.0 in Flash to create a simple visualizer that reacts to any sound file.
Using the computeSpectrum method from the SoundMixer class you can convert a sound file into graphics. The code looks pretty daunting if you're just learning ActionScript as I am but I found a great tutorial from Tom Green on Community MX that explains how it works really clearly.
I'm going to experiment some more over the next few days.
If anyone has any tips send them my way!

First Post

I've just set up my blog which I'm going to update regularly with various projects I'm working on and I'll also be using it as a way of documenting the steps of my final project for the Masters in Interactive Media. More on that soon...
You can also expect postings of the musical persuasion, whether that be stuff I'm working on or just sounds that are floating my boat at any given time.
That's all for now.

(by the way, ignore the design/layout of the blog for the moment; I'll get round to sorting it out soon)