Soundcubed

When our model arrived at Rockheim, the stage was set for the world to witness SoundCubed. At first we were having rather major issues with the RFID sensor, who decided to take the day off on Sunday. We were therefore somewhat worried that this would continue on Monday. Luckily it didn’t... The model worked rather flawlessly, and we quickly forgave the unfortunate behaviour of the past day. In terms of feedback from the audience, it was very positive. Not only did those who try it say it was cool, it also showed on their emotional response and the fact that many spent considerable time testing the model. This was exactly how we intended it to be used; no rules/manual, just exploration. The employees at Rockheim were also positive in their feedback, and asked us to exhibit the model for a weekend. During this exhibition, we also received much positive response from the outside visitors. As for the external sensor, we didn’t catch who it was… So we don’t know.     ...

This week, the last week before the deadline, we put all other projects aside as we attempted to finish our prototype. We’ve spent a lot of time in the workshop, making the physical parts of our installation, such as the “table” and the cubes. We discussed what materials to use and what techniques to adopt so as to achieve our envisioned result. For example, under the slider, we have acrylic plates that we wanted the lights to shine through in a flush motion. After testing them we discovered that they wouldn’t work such as they were, since you could see the individual leds underneath. We placed different materials between the acrylic and the leds to try and achieve the even light that we wanted and ended up being pretty satisfied with the light when we placed white paper sheets between.                       All the sound files have been inserted into the code and our sorting system is up and running. The code for the leds...

We started this weeks work with making a new prototype to test the possibility of bigger cubes. This prototype contains storage places for the cubes as well. Bigger cubes emphasize the focus on the materials, we want the user to feel the characteristics in addition to hear them. The RFID readers were again connected to this prototype, this time four of them. We have also acquired a Arduino Mega and we have established a serial connection between the Arduino and the Pi. A lot of work have been done in PureData. The wav files are stored and the speakers are playing the beat bar by bar. Things are beginning to work quite well. The music is also coming together nicely. Luckily for us, the melody is transformable to other instruments, that means that the different materials will have the same music, but with different sound qualities. This holds for the music in the middle slider as well. Until now, the middle slide has been a little undefined; how could it compliment the m...

The musical part of our project is progressing fairly well. Victoria has been making the different  beats for the metal cube, while Carina has been working on the melody that we will be using. We  combined the metal beat to the melody for the wood cube and were quite satisfied with the result. Things are finally starting to sound more like music. This week we also started looking into adressable LEDs, as well as how to organize the music in PureData. Until now, we’ve not known how to order them correctly, or how to get a smooth  transition between slider levels. We’ve tried to solve this with the Pd native functions spigot and  moses, which are essentially ifs and if-elses, as well as making a timer to trigger the sound. There is still a lot of work ahead of us when it comes to this system and making it run smoothly with the  sound files, but we are making progress. Additionally, we’ve developed a system for storing the different sound files, so tha...

This week our group has been taking on different tasks. Carina and Victoria are working on the music which will be produced as the cubes are inserted into the slots of the “mixing board”. They are using Garageband to create the beats and melodies of the different cubes. It has been challenging to find the right instruments for the corresponding materials, but we decided in the end to only use synth instruments. This way the focus won’t be on the particular instrument, but rather on the qualities of the sounds that are being produced from the “mixing board”. Victoria and Carina are currently exploring the different synth instruments available on Garageband so as to find sounds with the qualities we are looking for. On the more technical side of things, we opted to use Pure Data to play our music. The main reason for this, is Pure Datas compatibility with playing multiple sound files simultaneously. Hours were spent trying to get Raspberry Pi to import the correct libraries, but ev...

After a little bit of discussion, we ended up going for the first prototype. Although the second prototype had one clear purpose, it would probably have ended up too complex and less intuitive than the first idea. We decided to keep on working with the materials and increase their importance. This week we started testing the technology we are planning to use. Firstly we had to figure out how to track the cubes in the sliders of the mixing table. For this, the best option was using RFID chips and readers. We implemented them in our Wizard of Oz prototype by placing one RFID tag in the cube and three RFID readers under one of the sliders. In each part of the slider the cube will activate a different sound. For now we are using buzzers to illustrate and test our concept. The buzzers will most definitely not be used in our following prototypes . We have also acquired a Raspberry Pi and installed drivers to connect the Arduinos. We made our first purchase; a micro SD-card for the R...