Research Note 006: I’m curious about what makes a great music instrument. Have you ever wondered why certain instruments are so popular and people find new ways of creating music on them decade after decade? While other, possibly more interesting or technologically advanced instruments seem to get forgotten or dismissed as inaccessible. As I look at our current... More
Research Note 005 Doing this writing thing daily is not easy, after all I’ve already missed 3 days in my first week. I can always work up to being consistent about it. I feel like I’ve got to have something profound to say or why bother, but that’s not the point, is it? I’m writing daily as a... More
Research Note 004 I’m trying to write daily but sometimes there doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to get everything done. Practice guitar daily, Practice composing daily, an hour of learning through tutorials, perhaps I can start out not quite so ambitiously. Today I practiced guitar for an hour. Trying to learn Charlie Parker’s Anthropology,... More
Research Note 003 Podcasting with Scott Morgan of Loscil I woke up this morning feeling good about last night’s experiment. While watching my daughter’s soccer practise I recorded a conversation with Scott Morgan (aka Loscil). We’re considering creating a podcast about creating music and instruments and thought we could start by making a pilot of our podcast. I’ll... More
Research Note 002 Tactility in instruments Back in the 1990’s when I lived in Montreal I practiced guitar daily, sometimes for hours but usually for at least two hours. I’m working on getting back into that habit because it was so rewarding in ways I had not imagined at the time. During today’s morning guitar warmup I started... More
Research Note 001 Writing about thinking, as opposed to thinking about writing… As an effort to collect thoughts, practise writing and share ideas I’ve decided to journal my progress with my personal and professional research. If you’re interested in any of the ideas, experiments or projects I’ll be sharing please let me know in the comments below. Right... More
Installing the latest PureData on a Raspberry Pi After a fair bit of deliberation I was able to install Pure Data 0.49 on the Pi running Raspbian Stretch. I’ll walk through this step by step in case you’re not familiar with command line in Linux. The default way to install PureData (Pd) is: The only problem with this method of installing Pd is... More
Sensors into OSC with Python How do we move from analogue to digital? There seems to be quite a number of ways including 2D & 3D scanning, photography, and sensors. For the purposes of intentionally limiting our options we’re going to create a physical interface with potentiometers and buttons. We’ll be using the LOP board with a Raspberry Pi. Once... More
Talking about Mineblock at HIDC 2014 This week I had the honour to speak at HOW’s Interactive Design Conference 2014 in Chicago. It was great to have the opportunity to talk about how to design and experiment with the merging of hardware and software. I used the term Meta Products to describe the specific mashup of the physical object with sensors... More
Mineblock Product Design Design Process To me, the MINEBLOCK project represents an excellent example of the convergence of a vast number of technical, digital, physical and human constraints. Knowing that being able to keep a close eye on all of these considerations simultaneously was going to be next to impossible, I asked a few friends to help with... More