Category: Creative Process

The ‘creative process’ category is about anything that relates to or influences the creative process.

Using Conductive Ink Proximity Pads with Ableton

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Conductive Ink Proximity Pads controlling Ableton
Conductive Ink Proximity Pads controlling Ableton
Jo setting up the Conductive Ink Proximity Pads
Jo setting up the Conductive Ink Proximity Pads

One of the technologies we had on show at the SoundLab Play Space was Bare Conductive’s Conductive Ink and TouchBoard. We used these to connect to Ableton Live and control a variety of parameters in a set. It took quite a lot of tinkering around to get the pads and the board to work as we wanted, and a lot of time to calibrate the pads to get them sensing and sending MIDI CCs.

Hopefully I’ll be able to release to arduino code for the set we used soon. Hopefully I’ll be able to make some videos too to show how to get it done.

I think that that the TouchBoard is a really cheap and simple way to create effective gestural control via MIDI.

More on making conductive ink pads for proximity sensing

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Drawing up proximity pads
Drawing up proximity pads

After experimenting with my previous cards I decided to try a larger and denser pad for use as a proximity sensor.

There was a very good little tutorial on the Bare Conductive site so I used that. As you can see above it very sensibly suggests the use of masking tape to make these pads. I followed the instructions and made 4 pads in the end.

Proximity pads drying out
Proximity pads drying out

Whilst the tape removal wasn’t an entire success it was ok and didn’t stop the pads from working which was good.

Conductive ink
Conductive ink

I’m planning to post a much larger post around how to get these pads to work for music and how best to get the code up and running too. It might take a little while to get that going though, so hopefully it’ll be in a week or two.

Here’s something I’m doing for the SoundLab Play Space …

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Badly painted proximity sensing
Badly painted proximity sensing

One of the things I’ve been making for the SoundLab Play Space is some stuff to connect conductive ink with a bunch of Ableton Live sets. These were my first prototype cards. They worked ok, but they need some tweaking. It helped me to understand how to adapt the code to start to get the effect I was after, but it wasn’t quite there as yet. The next iteration, the one I plan to use on the day, well, Wednesday, should be much better!

We’ll see.

Processing 3 and the new sound library

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The last time I used Processing I was messing around with the minim library for sound. Now, in version 3, there’s the new sound library and it looks (and sounds) amazing!

I’ve only played with it a little but so far the example code looks really straightforward to read and understand. I might even start making a few things myself! Who knows.

Getting to grips with Processing 3

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I’ve been getting back into Processing 3. As I said when it first arrived, it’s been a while since I made things with Processing, but this version looks so much better than what’s gone before. Installing libraries and tools is now just so easy. It’s amazing. It feels like I really need to get back to making some stuff with Processing again.

Processing 3 arrives

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I do like Processing, although it’s been a while since I made anything with it. It looks like Processing is getting even better, with a new user interface which they’re continuing to develop post 3.0.

This comes on the heals of Codepoems, a new IDE for Processing, which I was considering trying out. I’ve no idea of whether or not Codepoems will work with Processing 3, that’s probably the next step for me.

The SoundLab guide is now available

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The new SoundLab site and guide is up now. It’s been a long time coming and it looks great. I hope that it will make a difference to organisations and groups and that it’ll be a useful resource. I can safely say that I had more fun from being a part of SoundLab than most other work I’ve been involved with.

Loving Barcodas and finding out about bar codes

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IMG_5576

I do like the idea of made from things that don’t normally make music. Hence I like barcodas. The idea of making little snippets of music from bar codes is very appealing. To me anyway. The interesting thing, at least, interesting to me anyway is that different types of bar codes seem to have very different properties. So for instance, using bar codes taken from books, these all sound the same, at least the first few notes do. Bar codes taken from cereal boxes are quite different.

So I had a little idea for a barcodas project that I think I’m going to try out soon.