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…

(more…)

Some of our email exchanges posted here for the record…

17 March – Anthony:

Finally got to your thread on the blog.  Here’s my thoughts:

Using the Monome to control sound on Martyn’s 3D-AudioScape should be technically fairly straight forward, as would the visualisation grid.  MIDI to OSC is no problem.  I don’t know much about DMX, but I think I did a student project a couple of years ago that used DMX…  or there are hardware solutions to convert between MIDI/DMX (e.g. http://www.lanbox.com/products/LCDataSheet.html – about GBP350 – no idea how good they are).  I’ll have a think…

I’m interested in that hack that allows you to control per LED brightness – that would rock; have you got it to work? It might make my camera thing make sense for a start.  I’ll fiddle with the accelerometer thing too – it wasn’t incorporated into the download when I first installed the Monome, so I haven’t used it yet

As for discome – getting the Monome to trigger discrete animations onscreen is fine, but doing any kind of animation on the Monome itself is doable but won’t look any good – as you found out yourself, 8×8 is very small to make meaningful graphics…

20 March – Anthony:

this is interesting :  http://monolake.de/installations/cyclone.html

i’m warming to the 3D sound interface idea

(more…)

As part of discome project I’m working on a version of Donna Summer’s 1977 disco classic I Feel Love…

Here’s an interesting Wikipedia article on the track… which says that this is the first disco-style song recorded with an entirely synthesized backing track!

In attempting to de/reconstruct it in Ableton Live I’ve come to realise what a groundbreaking production Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte actually created for its time. There is so much complexity and subtlety within what initially seems to be the fairly straightforward instrumentation and arrangement – which is why I suppose it’s such a classic and timeless track – der! So I’ve resolved to do my upmost to create a worthy monomatic version to reflect this… something I’ve just not found in those few remixes and reworkings I’ve actually listened to – of which there are very, very many…

Here’s the orginal… and my working rough…

[display_podcast]

(this is just a first draft instrumentation and arrangement and is far from finished… but it’s coming along well I think)

Next I’ll be attempting to create robotic renditions of the main and harmony vocal lines using Repeat After Me 1.3 – Apple’s phonetic Text To Speech app bundled in the OS X Leopard Developer Tools.

discome is the meeting point between the minimalist interfaces of monome and the pixelised design of sensomatic’s discomatic.

The momome is a beautifully designed, hand-crafted, minimalist interactive interface for controlling and monitoring pretty much anything audio, visual and beyond… a reconfigurable grid of backlit keypads which connects to a computer. Interaction between the keys and lights is determined by the application running on the computer – there is no hard-wired functionality.

discomatic is a graphic design project which aims to build an entire dancing robot army for world domination and flood the world with disco!

discome brings them together – using the interactive interface of the monome to control and respond to 21st century disco music and the funky dancing of the discomatic robot – for endless hours of realtime disco fun!