Some of our email exchanges posted here for the record…

7 May – Anthony:

And Monomes….  I’m planning a Summer of fun.  Battleships, discome and the 3D-AudioScape interface on the agenda at the mo – hopefully in Processing or OpenFrameworks – are these still all live ideas?

15 May – Lewis:

Yes I’d like to move these forward too… 

3D-AudioScape interface seems the most solid in terms of agreed funding… and I’m still keen to develop an application schematic for phase 1 based on the blog.monomatic.net post as a starting point…

discome… I’m working on the audio again… just back up and running on my Boot Camp reinstall – an act of sheer desperation – I just couldn’t work out what was going wrong but now realise it was only a fault  with a new plug-in… grrr. I’ll email sensomatic for the graphics and cc you in… I’m not sure what is happening with funding from BSkyB for this though… I’ve heard nothing from Eva recently – will try and speak with her soon. Also my ACE application for the monome open practice project was unsuccessful…  and though I’ve reapplied its all looking a bit shaky. Ho hum…

Battleships… yes please… everyone I mention this to loves the idea… I’ll start to work on audio as agreed – hunting out a suitable source movie now.

And I think Processing as a prototyping tool would be good… there’s the monomic library – now updated (in part) by my new monome friend Daniel – so communication via the device is ready to go. And it means I can contribute too since I’ve worked a bit with Processing – so I can look into working with audio a bit. Then perhaps we could port it over to Open Frameworks later…

15 May – Lewis:

Here’s what we’re thinking about…

discome will be an interactive installation – a monome on a plinth in front of a screen or white wall with stereo speakers

In ‘idle’ mode the installation will make a few small disco noises and show the discomatic robot at rest – or ‘fidgeting’.  Occasionally the monomatic version of ‘I Feel Love’ will play through the speakers and the discomatic robot will dance on the screen (rather like the existing discomatic shockwave piece but without the key stroke interactivity) – although we’re planning to put him (?) in a 3D environment. We may also, depending on time, make this a bit more ‘pop promo’ like – fast edits, big close ups, camera pans and tilts etc. the audio track may also get some treatment and filtering to make it more varied. 

The monome itself will display variously in this mode – an arrow pointing to a flashing button to start the interaction… or as a disco-dance-floor during the ‘pop promo’ for example. The really nice thing about the monome is that it doubles as input and display… and although the 8×8 1-bit grid is restrictive we were hoping you would be interested in working within its limitations to develop some graphics and animations that could be displayed on the device… it certainly fits with your minimalist pixelated aesthetic 😉

In ‘interaction’ mode viewers will be able to use the monome as an input device to construct/reconstruct their own version of the track – either as a simple 8 track 8 step sequencer triggering different sounds within the mix – and simultaneously the dance moves of the discomatic robot – or possibly as something a bit more abstract – a looper allowing different audio tracks within the mix to be set to different loop lengths creating polyrhythmic disco! Haven’t quite worked this out yet – but you get the idea.

The monome also sends tilt data – it has an accelerometer built in – so picking up the device and tilting it could affect the sound – or most obviously, control movement through the 3D environment… wicked.

That’s about it in terms of what we’ve thought of… and even some of this I’ve just made up so will be new to Ant… but happy to hear your feedback and ideas too of course.

So what we’d like from you are:

1. Director files of the current Shockwave piece… or any other relevant animation or graphic files.  Ant works with Director so should have no problem extracting the sprites and moving them into a 3D environment… sooner the better too.
2. Animations for the ‘pop promo’ – perhaps this is actually something you could develop alongside the audio and then we integrate later?
3. Graphics and animations developed specifically for a the 8×8 1-bit grid.  In fact we may shortly be able to get per led intensity with a firmware hack – so we can have 16 levels of brightness on any led on the device which will allow for 8×8 pixel anti-aliasing and grayscale images and video – we’ll let you know if this works out.
4. Any other ideas and elements you guys would like to suggest…

16 May – Anthony:

This all sounds good to me.  I like the idea of using the Monome to interactively jumpcut a pop-promo style discome video – closeups etc controled by button presses.  And tilting affecting his/her position in a 3D space but only visible if no buttons are pressed.

Bit of work there though….  let me know what Florian says

On the other things, I finally had a peak at Antoine Schmitt’s site – as I said before I have worked with him (he built us a VoIP xtra) and although that project wasn’t a huge success his work is good.  He has xtras (Wintel Mac compatible) for UDP and multichannel audio, which makes me think that maybe I could do the whole thing, including audio control, in Director.  That would be good.  Although I’m keen to port myself over to other platforms, I know Director best and if it can do the job then I think I’ll stick with it.  I’ll try the xtras out in the coming days and let you know what works…

16 May – Lewis:

Hopefully we’ll hear back from Sensomatic shortly and can plan from there…

I think that you should do the 3D-AudioScape controller in Director – if Antoinne’s xtras work. It’s what you know and it’ll be fast and efficient. Also I know Director reasonably well and can help with things like design, gui, help info etc…

And perhaps we could develop Battleships in Processing? It communicates with the monome, has all the OSC and audio functionally we need – and is a stepping stone to Open Frameworks, Java, C++ and beyond… which will allow you to port over to other platforms in a strategic but relatively relaxed way… Sound like a plan?