Week 11
Kate's Physical Computing Journal
Some Thoughts on the 11th week of Physical Computing....
I was looking at an artist who uses the actual circuitry as part of his piece. I thought it was an interesting approach although I don't know if I would have the patience to this. Anyway, I wrote him and he wrote back and so now we are conversing a bit. He has some great tutorials on art and circuits, but I can't think of his website off the top of my head. I'll try to remember to put it in next weeks. It might be somewhere on my art links page...I'll stick that here, there are a lot of good sites linked from there. ART
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/visualize0402.asp
I researched haptics this week. I'm not really interested in what they are doing now with haptics but what the future possibilities are. At the very basic level you can describe haptics as a way of communicating a sense of touch. Some companys are making technologies that will allow people to hit, pull, punch, grab, etc. Once company, SensAble has made a FreeForm system that consists of a stylus attached to a jointed arm. The user uses this to sculpt objects from virtual clay. Right now making such devises is very expensive. However, there are so many uses for haptics that I believe they will one day be much more integrated into our every day computing environments. Haptics could be used to create the feeling of closeness with people who are far away. They will probably first show up large scale in commercial applications for entertainment, but science, psychology, art, etc could all use this technology.
I have always felt like the sense of tacitility is missing in the computer experience. This might be one answer to this problem.
Using midi and synthesizers
dim inputBuffer(1 To 13) As
Byte
dim outputBuffer(1 To 10) As Byte
dim midiCmd as byte
dim velocity as byte
Sub main()
call delay(0.5) ' start program with a half-second delay
dim noteVar as byte
' set up serial buffers:
call openQueue(inputBuffer, 13)
call openQueue(outputBuffer, 10)
' open serial port on COM1:
call openCom(1, 9600, inputBuffer, outputBuffer)
' set baud rate to 30,270:
register.ubrr = 14 do
' get a note range from roughly 30 to 90
' using a 10K variable resistor as input
' on pin 14:
noteVar = cByte((getADC(14) mod 60) + 30)
' sent a noteon message, channel 1, velocity 64:
midiCmd = 144
velocity = 64
call putQueue(OutputBuffer, midiCmd, 1)
call putQueue(OutputBuffer, noteVar, 1)
call putQueue(OutputBuffer, velocity, 1)
call delay(0.5)
' noteon to the same note, velocity 0
' (essentially noteoff):
midiCmd = 144
velocity = 0
call putQueue(OutputBuffer, midiCmd, 1)
call putQueue(OutputBuffer, noteVar, 1)
call putQueue(OutputBuffer, velocity, 1)
call delay(0.5)
loop
end sub
"MIDI does not define the nature or timbre of a synthesized sound. It merely describes the action of playing the sounds."
Setting up the circuit was the hardest part of working with midi.
--final project --something to make New York more livable for people who come from smaller places