Music Control, Interactive Music Systems, Physical Computing, Natural User Interface, Tangible Computing, OSC, MIDI, Max/MSP, TUI/NUI, Interactive Scultpure, Processing, Chuck, Arduino, FTIR, Audicle, Monome 40h, DIY, openSource, Reaktor 5, Granular Synthesis, Analog Synthesis, Analog Sequencers, Touch Control, Haptics, Xenome, The Stribe
FAQ:
what is soundwidgets.com?
It's a blog where I post cool stuff I find on the web. I try to post projects which more or less relate to the above topics. Sometimes I just post random stuff.
This also acts as an informal project blog for a music control device I'm designing and building called the Stribe.
I also occasionally post clips and info relating to experimental electronic music I make under the name phineus.
do you sell stuff?
Actually, yes! You can support The Stribe Project by buying parts or donating through the new Stribe Project Forum.
what does "stribe" mean?
It means "stripe" or "striped cloth" in Danish.
I made a Stribe Project Forum - please join! I'm using it to keep track of all the details, and hopefully keep the project organized as more people get involved.
(Also started to set up a mediawiki but not much there, yet - if anyone feels like expanding on it it's here and will eventually be updated).
Right now the forum's a repository of notes and facts about the Stribe project so far. I hope it will be a landing spot for people interested in participating in the project in one way or another, either by building or buying a Stribe, improving and expanding the (admittedly incomplete and amateurish) firmware and Max patches, or just watching from the sidelines.
screenshot of _stribe_howto.mxb (virtual stribe) in action - click for big view
I'm plodding forward on several fronts at once, mostly doing boring stuff like trying to put together a stribe wiki and/or forum type thing as well as juggling parts to build a handful of prototypes for development. Today I took some time to clean up the Max code so far and it looked so pretty I had to take a picture.
Meanwhile Vlad Spears (author of Balron and the Daevel behind Daevelmaker Plugins) wrote a Max abstraction to translate values from the Max matrixctrl object into the message format expected by the Stribe, something I'd been struggling with trying to solve in firmware.
The pieces were all there in Max but I needed that one final bit and Vlad was able to do it from a few vague e-mails and a .jpg of a scrawled napkin drawing. Amazing.
Looks like he has a 40h, too. With a quick peek at the Buchla box in the corner.
(Earlier this was posted as being Trent Reznor but that was an error. Neither having met Trent nor seen him up close I didn't realize this is actually Alessandro Cortini. It was on the nin youtube page so I just figured it was him - my apologies to all.)
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Thursday, December 6, 2007
Learning Max/MSP
I'm learning Max/MSP. I sometimes find the Cycling74 site a little intimidating because there's just SO much information, and the online Tutorials run a bit long for my ADD brain, so I went looking for some other resources. I found this great online set of Max tutorials. Much more condensed - skips right to relevant stuff and tells you exactly what you need to know to get started learning Max, and is divided into logical 6- to 12-page chunks. The chunks range from a great basic Introduction to Max (required reading) to more esoteric: Max and Chaos.
I've made a major revision to the Stribe circuit boards, rotating them 180 degrees to better reflect the way Max/MSP addresses arrays and to make my firmware simpler (and hopefully faster). Short version: 0,0 is the top left corner now instead of the bottom left. I also moved the logic circuit to the top of the board, which is the same place the touch-strips attach. So now I avoid 8 long trace runs as well as making a better location to add a MIDI circuit or other interface connectors (8 synth-type voltage triggers, anyone?).
Meanwhile I've also been working on the firmware and the Max patches, getting everything talking to everything else. I'm borrowing lots of example code as well as nabbing a few of Brian Crabttree's handier bits of code (the bits I can understand). I'm building a "virtual stribe" with the matrixctrl object.