Here is a sneak preview of a new piece, composed and performed by Garth Paine for flute and live electronic processing using the Capybara, Kyma system .

 

 Atmospheric Ripple [10:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The piece was premiered at the New York Electronic Arts Festival on June 4, 2007. The concert was produced by EMF Productions: Electronics & Virtuosity

This new piece will be included on a new CD from SynC (Garth Paine and Michael Atherton) later this year.

Enjoy, Garth

Available as Podcast at http://www.activatedspace.com/blog/?feed=rss2

The Federation Bells is a new approach to carlillions - developed by Neil McLachlan and Anton Hasell, the bells are in Melbourne’s newest city park, Birrarung Mar, beside the Yarra River

The Australian Bell project is a sound sculpture of 39 bells collectively named the ‘Federation Bells’ that performs the works of seven Australian contemporary composers everyday between 8-9am and again between 5-6pm and was launched in Melbourne on Australia Day (26 January 2002).

The Federation Bells are tuned using ‘just’ tuning, as opposed to the more familiar ‘equal temperament’, the way a piano is tuned in 12 equally distributed intervals. ‘Just’ tuning is based on naturally occurring pitches from the harmonic series, which create a purer array of overtones -- overtones that have not been imposed by an equally tempered tuning system. In other words, its closer to Pythagoras’ idea of harmony than to Bach’s. Bells, however, vibrate in different ways to stringed instruments and so require a different tuning treatment.

The ABC have a story on the bells here
The Space Music Feature: Australian Bell Project

and the AusBell Site is here.

I wrote a work called Klangfarbe for the inaugration.

Garth Paine on The Australian Sound Design website - a Project establish by Ros Bandt on which Garth worked for a year to assists with the establishment of the web interface.

Paine, Garth - Australian Sound Design Project Biographical entry

The OceanServer Serial 3 Axis Tiny Digital Compass is even smaller than the WiTilt and packs in a high resolution digital compass. This board is only one inch square, hoever it has a serial output rather than a wireless one, but there are a number of solutions to turn this into Class 1 Bluetooth (100m) -such as

BlueConsole
The Brainbox adaptors or the
Air Cables which have solutions for up to 10KM's

There are other sensor options in this range including the:

IMU 5 Degrees of Freedom sensor, which would need a wireless card and driver, but it carries a IDG300 dual-axis gyroscope and Analog Devices triple axis accelerometer and is less than 1 inch square - Dimensions: 0.75"x0.9" (20x23mm).

Rather more expensive is this Complete Inertia Measurement System - IMU 6 Degrees of Freedom - v2 with ADXRS150 which also does not include Bluetooth. Dimensions: 2x2" (51x51mm)

W2O (WiTilt to OSC) is a data processor, running on Mac OS X, for use with the Wireless Accelerometer / Tilt Sensor version 2 by Sparkfun. More specifically, W2O is a combination of a Bluetooth data server and an Open Sound Control client.

3-D tilt / accelerometer measurement data transmitted from the WiTilt v.2 sensor is received via Bluetooth, packaged into customizable OSC messages, and then sent out to any destination over network through UDP.

This thing is small:
Carrier board : 1.5x2" (38x51mm)
Overall height fully populated : 0.275" (7mm)
Overall height slim population : 0.145" (3.7mm)

I love the sea and I love sailing, but these pictures make my boots feel a bit cold - not the kind of weather I would choose to be out in... These are pictures from the Bridge of the SELKIRK SETTLER in a BIG storm - The storm pictures were taken during a North Atlantic storm February, 13, 1987 on an eastbound passage from Tampa, Florida to Ghent, Belgium with a load of phosphates. The pictures were taken by Capt. George Ianiev, who was the ship's Second Mate at the time. The big blue wave was the largest wave the ship encountered during the storm; seeing it hit the ship made the vessel's master question whether they would survive the storm. (see addition reference :: HERE :: )

This is a big ship - you can see her :: HERE ::

The actual boat

The Soundgin is a serially controlled Sound Synthesizer in a PIC.
It produces complex sound effects, synthesizer style music and English speech with an unlimited vocabulary.
For use in manufactured electronics and home projects.

The software control interface is documented here

Available in an 18-Pin DIP or SOIC package.
2.0 to 5.0 Volts Operation
16Khz Sample Output Rate
2400 or 9600 Baud Serial Connection
6 Independently Controlled Voices
Amp, Freq, Ring Modulation
Hard Sync.
ADSR Envelopes
Musical Notes
English Phonemes
Sound Morphing
In-Chip Presets
Object Class for ooPICSoundgin

The CLF Group had established a common data specification format so that diffusion angles etc can be compared - a very useful site although the manufacturer list is a bit short at this stage - worth watching though

This is an entertaining and rather insightful lecture on education - the importance of the arts and innovation and personal expression

Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
TED Conferences
20 min - 5/07/2006
www.ted.com

Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. With ample anecdotes and witty asides, Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize -- much less cultivate -- the talents of many brilliant people. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. The universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online. A typical review: "If you have not yet seen Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, please stop whatever you're doing and watch it now."

This is an interesting project developing tactile interfaces for VR such as Second Life. Touching The Meshverse < The Meshverse Journal