Running to Stand Still

Idea:"Grass Grows from the Middle" is a musical field which imitates the feeling of moving through stalks of wheat. As the user moves through the field, different music samples are played.

Description:
The first iteration of "Grass Grows..." is a 3' x 3' prototype containing 10 5' high stalks. Each stalk is programmed to play a different starting point in the first movement of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring."

Team:
Michael Chladil
Shlomit Lehavi

Exhibitions:
ITP Audio Art Show (April 30, 2007)

Process

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Description
"Musical Spinning Tops" is a kinetic sculptural curtain which incorporates salvaged parts from hard disk drives to highlight the theme of reuse and the cycle of products from raw material to designed object and back to raw material.

Spinning toys such as tops and gyroscopes transform from one shape into another. No matter the starting shape of a top, once it rotates it forms the shape of a circle. In recycling, a similar process occurs. The designed shape of an object, after its operating lifecycle is complete, is transformed back into raw material and then back into a new designed object. The rotation of elements in the sculpture refer to this process.

Team:
- Michael Chladil
- Greg Stringer

Process

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I made Spanish Omelettes for breakfast at "makeBreakfast" (or "Alice's Restaurant" as I've been calling it) on April 25. Shinyoung was my guest.

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Images from the latest building session.

I made a solid wooden frame to hold one of the aluminum pulleys. There's a problem, though. The shaft exhibits a fair degree of wobble when the gyroscope is spun. During critique on Thursday, it was suggested that there should be a piece of metal in the hole so the bottom of the shaft will turn more smoothly. It would be even better to use bearings... which I've now tried.

I salvaged bearings from the read/write heads of two hard disk drives. Mounting the bearings was tricky, though, because they must be precisely aligned. This is even more difficult for me as my bearings aren't the same size. You can see this in my pictures of the PVC pipe gyroscope.

I think I would like to make a gyroscope frame out of metal pipe next.

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The following is a record of an electronic surgery performed on 4/18/2007 in the Physical Computing Laboratory at ITP, wherein the patient "Dust" was brought to "life" in the manner of Frankenstein.

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We added more details to the state machine which defines Dust's behavior and started writing code to implement it.

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We want to be able to sense how far people are pushing the poles in our installation. I thought we could do this by measuring how much force the PVC poles are exerting on the ring they're sitting in.

Since force sensing resistors from Interlink Electronics are expensive ($5-6/each) and also because I couldn't see how the fragile FSRs would fit into the holes we planned to use, I wanted to find a better solution.

I discovered it was possible to create FSRs out of wire and plastic wrap. Others have used conductive foam and wire mesh. Reading about linear position sensors also gave some insights.

I took 22 gauge wire from the physcomp lab, stripped it, and bent it back and forth to mimic the "fingers" on the FSRs I purchased from Interlink. After making two wire finger pieces, I wrapped one in seven layers of plastic wrap. I place the second set of wire fingers on the outside of the package and wrapped it into the existing package. My first few tests seemed very promising. When no pressure was applied to the package, the resistance was infinite. When I squashed the package, the resistance dropped down to about 10K.

The next trick was to try to duplicate this behavior on the end of a PVC pipe. We first tried applying the plastic wrap/wire packages around the end of the PVC pipe. The results were less encouraging than my initial experiments.

The homemade sensors were unreliable: either the sensor package was too tightly squashed between the PVC and the surrounding hole (and gave no resistance) or it was too loose and no amoung of bending the pole caused a reading.

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This reminds me of the story of the gingerbread man -- you know, he ran as fast as he could... but still ended up in the oven.

We started out with two halves joined together, but then realized that our presentation model should incorporate some of the circuitry. We cut out a door in the back to hold the speaker, LEDS, and vibrating motor.

Polymer clay (in this case SculpeyPremo) bakes for 25 minutes at 275° (or close to it).

After baking, the surface looks more matte.

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Taking a look back at the breadboarded circuit always turns up something I've neglected on the schematic: in this case, it's the vibrating motor.

I'm also a little concerned; I haven't heard the amplified sound from the MP3 player through a circuit we had on another breadboard.

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Work continues on the schematic for Dust. I have spent hours in Eagle drawing this thing.

Design Questions:

• Current design will require two USB ports (Arduino + MP3 player). Will it be necessary to include both of them on the PCB?
• How much current does the circuitry require?
• What type of battery will we use to power the circuitry?

I also started creating a PCB design. I want to print it out this afternoon to see the physical size and see if this corresponds with the size we want to make the wearable item.

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My friend Mark P. Sullivan always said he wanted to make windchimes with all of the dead hard disk drives he had collected over the years. This came back to me as we struggled to find ways to make music with tops, so I started disassembling all of the broken drives I could find to listen to the sound of the platters

Case Mods
We modified our original protoype using one of the disk platters. Several small screws were placed within a cavity in the top beneath the platter in the hopes of making a sweet ringing sound. This was not successful. The centripetal / centrifugal (I always confuse them) force kept the screws jammed against the walls of the top as it spun so it didn't make any sound.

This is the best spinning top we have so far. Its proportions are comparable top those given in an article we found about machining tops from aluminum.

Whistling... Not Quite
I tried to drill holes in the platters, thinking it might be possible to get a whistling sound as the top spun. The only sound I produced was a pop as the platter shattered. It appears that the disk platters are not metals as I thought. They shatter like glass.

I constructed another test top out of a metal cone from a ceiling-mounted air vent we found on the junk shelf. I did my best to match the "ideal" top proportions.

This one doesn't spin very well -- and is quite dangerous when launched from the power drill.

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The Audio Art class will present a show of our work on the 9th Floor of the Tisch Building on Sunday, April 29th from 5-8pm. Email me for further details.

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On Saturday, Shlomit and I built another prototype of our audio art installation.

We went to Home Depot in search of bamboo and springs, but came back with 1/2" (ID) PVC and cast iron flanges.

The bamboo remains a cost-effective option ($1.79 for a package of 4-5 x 5' stalks).

We attached 3/4" x 1/2" reducing adapters onto one end of ~5' x 1/2" (i.d.) PVC pipes and screwed them into a 3/4" flanges mounted on a sheet of plywood. We painted the PVC poles hunter green to loosely reference a field of tall grass.

We created the prototype with two poles on it to see how the poles would flex as people move through them.

It was a great day to work outside and we were pleased with the progress we made.

Construction Lessons
- When cutting plywood, cut through the side you wish to display so the ragged edges are hidden
- Plan the flange installation better so the holes will line up on the top and bottom playwood pieces
- We will need to custom cut a 4'x8' plywood sheet to get the 6'x3' installation we want

Sound
We made further progress as we began to discuss the sound of the field. Both of us were drawn to the opening bars of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The was some initial confusion about whether we were listening to the "Rite of Spring" or the "Firebird Suite", but I resolved that as of this writing. The solo oboe (or perhaps clarinet?) provides a mysterious sonic backdrop for exploring a new space. We plan to edit a small sample from the first track and control its playback using the sensors we are planning to attach to the PVC poles. As users enter the installation, they will have the opportunity to push their way through our sound field. Each subsequent PVC pole they push will play the next piece of the sample we've chosen. If they walk push through the field at the right speed (according to the mood of the selected piece), they will hear the melody as they move.

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Design
Top Design Principles
Machining Tops from Aluminum Stock
Beautifully Handcrafted Tops
Paper Clip Top

History
Where did the Spinning Top Come From
Every possible way to slice up the properties and names of tops....

Movies

The sounds Ian Russell gets out of his tops are quite diverse considering he is only using a ribbed wooden fruit bowl as a resonator.

Glossary
shaft - stem, peg
body
center of mass
axis

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Alice Planas and I have been investigating the idea of speech as music. The following is a summary of our in-class presentation from Friday, April 6.

Why?
- We've both done field recordings
- Alice interested in the creative potential in the raw content she's been capturing
- I want to see what can be done compositionally with speech as a "generator," for melody; many people seem to have musical voices

Process
- Tried two approaches initially: compositional & computational

- Attempted to write melodies from in-class recordings by listening and transcribing. This is time-consuming -- and made further difficult by the distraction of the meaning of the spoken words. Perhaps it is easier when you don't know the people who are speaking or don't care about the content of the discussion... but in our case we were too close.

- Attempted to create a pitch-following patch in MAX/MSP. The idea behind pitch-following was to separate the frequency spectrum into separate slots - ideally a half-step apart and then track which slot had the greatest energy level.

Pitch-Following Resources
- Fiddle - MAX/MSP patch for continuous pitch tracking
- Paper: Strategies for Continuous Pitch and Amplitude Tracking in Realtime Interactive Improvisation Software
- My earlier experiments

Listening Selections
Larry Austin - 3 tracks audio portrait of Joan La Barabara (obtained at Avery Fischer Media Center in Bobst Library)
Joan La Barbara - 73 poems
Thomas Buckner - "His Tone of Voice at 37"
Paul DeMarinis - Music as a second Language:"An Appeal"
Laurie Anderson - "NY Social Life" (requires NYU ID/password)
Bobby McFerrin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtXrKo8Btfc

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It's that time again: ITP Spring Show 2007

Come see what we've been up to all semester. Bring the family.

Tuesday, May 8, 5-9 pm
Wednesday, May 9, 5-9 pm

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Continuing in the process of creating expressive personal objects, I performed a piece called "Spinning Out of Control". I was working to express the feeling of anxiety that comes from trying to keep too many facets of life spinning simultaneously without assistance.

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This entry will catch up on some of our progress in creating a series of musical tops.

The week of our prototype presentation, we built a number of sample tops.

I also purchased two toy tops for a performance I gave in Designing for Constraints two weeks ago. One is a "BayBlade" and the other is a Duncan gyroscope.

I wanted to gain a better appreciation for how tops are constructed before we tried to make more of our own.

We discussed creating acoustic resonators for the tops to spin on and also tried to think of ways to make sounds with the tops. Qwanya (sp?) turned me onto the sound of tempered metals. She explained that her favorite sound in the Physical Computing Shop comes from the top right draw of the toolchest. The hole saws ping melodically whenever the drawer opens.

After presenting our prototypes in class, we received the following feedback:

• Become conversant in the vocabulary of tops
• Look at Taiwanese tops
• Consider the correlation between the tops and music. What is it?
• What about whistling tops?

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For the past two days I've been building up the Dust prototype circuit.

So far I've gotten away with entirely found parts... This is fine for the breadboard, but for our final wearable version, we'll need to reduce the size significantly.

• Relays are Omron G5A and an OEG 105D. These are much too big. I would prefer Omron G6H (high density)
• TIP-120 Darlington transistors could be replaced by 2N3904 transistors (or maybe there are SMD transistors). I originally wanted to avoid using relays to drive the MP3 player, but our tests with transistor-only circuits were unsuccessful.
• The Coby MP3 player is small, but the Sakura (from the designer of the MAKE DaisyMp3) is smaller -- and open source.

Remaining tasks:

• Writing the Arduino code
• Testing the LM386-based amplifier

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.what.
Greg Stringer and I will create a series of musical tops which act as an improvised toy orchestra. Each top in the series creates a distinct and pleasing musical sound. As multiple tops spin simultaneously, their musical sounds will combine into a larger homogeneous sound. The sound of several tops spinning together will be unique and fleeting; it will be difficult to spin the same tops in exactly the same order at identical velocities.

.why.
I'm interested in systems which enable musical improvisation among people who have the desire to create music but lack the technical competence on a musical instrument. The musical tops present a low barrier to music creation; they are found in many cultures and require little skill to operate.

Spinning tops transform from one shape into another. No matter the starting shape of a top, once it rotates it forms the shape of a circle. In recycling, a similar process occurs. The designed shape of an object, after its operating lifecycle is complete, is transformed back into raw material and then back into a new designed object. The rotation of our tops will refer to this process.

.how.
The tops will be constructed from salvaged parts to highlight the theme of reuse and the cycle of products from raw material to designed object and back to raw material.

Several types of tops will be created to provide desired musical properties: percussive and melodic sounds.

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