(Serving suggestion.)

Some initial thoughts about the hardware construction of the campanile.

We are thinking about an eight-bell setup, with eight ringing posts, one for each bell. Each post has to be able to sense a ringing gesture, and to display the state of the bell (in other words, its position). Although physical bells are completely independent (I assume: is there any kind of physical interaction between them as they ring?), PEAL requires a central processing unit in order to display and animate ringing patterns. So: how independent are the ringing posts? How much of a brain does each one have? (more…)

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

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This post is partly a response to Ant’s most recent email to me:
“I’m feeling slightly up a blind alley with the Monome at the moment. It’s a wonderful piece of hardware, it’s beautiful, fast, flexible etc but utterly meaningless at the moment. I can’t think of an interesting way to use it.”

I wanted to update my profile at monome.org with a photo and some info – now that I’m starting to post regularly. I was thinking about suitable 1 bit 8×8 pixel graphics – and thought of Space Invaders (obviously)… and tracked down (with surprising difficulty) a set of characters in this Invader from Space font. It turns out most of them aren’t actually 8×8 pixels 🙁 – but there are a few that are and I’ve chosen my favourite 😉

We haven’t had a chance to meet and really talk in the past few weeks – since getting the devices in fact – so I thought that a bit of critical reflection might help Ant understand my perspectives – and let me highlight some illustrative examples – and that might help him… possibly…

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