these are midterm weeks. so, for my midterm i made the controls for the remote as part of my installation. on the rest of my blog, there are better descriptions (wait, are there?) of what i’m doing for my thesis, which is entitled “You’re not brown, just tan.” I’m exploring being a half-Iranian woman who grew up in an Evangelical Texan suburb and felt culturally disconnected. so, i’m creating a series of hybridized objects and videos to reconstruct my childhood memories and personal narratives into a new identity. For this project, I am creating the “interactivity” of a television for the videos I made for the space. They are all portraying childhood memories in different television formats: a cooking show, a soap opera, a horror movie trailer, and a music video. I want the audience to consume this media as I did while growing up and forming my identity.

I created the switcher for the television remote I’m making to scroll between the videos in the installation. It consists of two switches: an up and a down. I presented the switches connected to an Arduino and have code for that as well that I’ll post a bit later. Right now, I’m posting the Max patch (don’t hate me!) I created to do the switching.

Future plans I’m working on: remaking the project in Pd because I’ll be using an XBee for the final and will want to use Pduino with the XBee code that Mike and I worked on with Hans last semester. Also, creating the remote and putting overlays of “Ch 3, Ch 4″ on the videos as you switch.

Download the Max patch here.

this week we added video, so the synthesis stuff from last week actually controls the frames of the video you’re seeing this week. you can load your own video into the patch by banging the openpanel object.

download it here.

here’s a composition using no sounds or samples. just synthesis stuff. you can change the speed with the slider at the top, and change the frequencies with the different sliders below that one.

pink sliderz rulz.

download it here.

for this assignment, i created a sequencer similar to last time, but you can control playback of the samples using the mouse. the x-coordinate of your mouse location when you click determines which sample plays. and the y-coordinate changes the frequency of the modulator signal. so, it sounds like the original clip when your mouse is at the top of the screen, and as you get lower, it sounds tweaked out.

the samples from last week are still being used for this patch, so make sure to put them in the same folder before you play this.

download it here.

for this week, we had to make a sequencer using different methods (phasor~, noise~, osc~) for processing samples.

to download the samples, click here.

to download the sequencer, click here.

(the sequencer won’t work without these samples. be sure to load them into the same folder where you’ve saved the sequencer file…)

we’re learning Pd (Pure Data) as our dataflow programming language. to see the files i’ll be posting here, go to the Pure Data downloads page. It’s open-source and rad- similar to Max MSP…

the class is taught by Hans Christoph-Steiner, who’s one of the developers on Pd. it meets tuesdays from 330-6pm. here’s the class website.

last but not least, here’s a ring modulator a bit enhanced….assignment 1!