And another great write up of the SoundLab Play Space. This time in The Memo. Kitty has done us proud with this article about the event.
Category: Tech
At times wonderful, and at times totally frustrating too. That’s technology, my experience of it anyway. I do a lot of stuff with technology and I suspect I will continue to do that.
Thanks for that Mr Concretedog!
Using Conductive Ink Proximity Pads with Ableton
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
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.
Whilst the tape removal wasn’t an entire success it was ok and didn’t stop the pads from working which was good.
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.
This is the suit
I backed this on Kickstarter as I just wanted to be a very tiny part of the this. It didn’t matter how small. Also I think it is really important to preserve things like this, and I thought it was great that people from all over the world got to be a part of it by putting in little money.
Here’s something I’m doing for the SoundLab Play Space …
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.
Getting ready to fix up an old iBook G4
I plan to use the old iBook to run older software and maybe even an old emulator or two as well. I’ve upgraded the RAM to 1.25GB now and it’s pretty good.
Processing 3 and the new sound library
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
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.
Philip Rees V3 and V4
Just thought I’d post these two side by side.
I am Ashley Elsdon 