TUIO is protocol for exchanging multitouch information.  MIDI is a protocol for encoding music note information.  This is a bridge for using multitouch interfaces to make music in ableton live.

pitch, brightness, loudness, and bark ( how much noise )

infer spatial positioning and form.

pitch: left to right
brightness: z location
loudness: depth of the visual ( thickness )
bark: you see it displayed as scattered short pitches during the breath before each vocal part

using ‘soundfeature send‘ and processing i put together a realtime visualizer which i use in live performance.  here’s a cover i did of nat king cole’s ‘nature boy’ run pumped through it…

Stay tuned for a Soundfeature Receive patch. : )

Click Here To Download The Rockband Drum Controller Midi Interface

Documentarist David Holmes took some footage of me sharing the Surface and rambling a bit about my practice in April of 2011. The actual sound of the surface is much more refined than is demonstrated in this footage, but hopefully this can give you an idea of what the instrument does in the meantime:

After I have the formal documentation for the surface finished I’ll post the modified CCV as well as build instructions for the frame…

The touchquilt is the first piece in my visual instrument series. I undertook it as a means of solving some of the problems I had run into involving projection interaction with the wiimote whiteboard setup in performance. The wiimote whiteboard approach often required sensitive calibration, placement, and lighting, the touchquilt can just be plugged in via ethernet. Here’es a schematic for the first implementation of the quilt:

As the video suggests, with this resistor ladder approach I was able to get a fairly accurate reading on which button was being pushed if I held the button for long enough, but associated with each press was a significant amount of electrical noise which made the quilt unpredictable. As an installation piece the unpredictability was interesting, but as a visual instrument it was problematic.  I later modified the quilt to utilize a time based method for much more stable results.  I found that by attaching each column to a digital row I could scan a voltage across the surface of the quilt allowing me to test each individual button to determine if there was contact.  This enabled 16 point multi-touch ( 1 press per row ) as well, which is nice.  Here’s a shot of it opened up from the back:

Shoot me an email at brian@amanamun.com if you’d like more information on this project.  If you’d still like to see the code or more details on the construction prior to the time-based changes I made, you can also check out my post on the arduino forum. To download the code for the stable version of the quilt click here.

This performance of (12/19/2008) marked the beginning of my experimentation with projection-interaction for the use of live performance. The song is a resequencing of scapegoating, a song you can find on my record waxing.

It is meant to be a conceptual exploration of taking something that is open source (the monome) and making it even more flexible and open. The monome itself is only a grid of buttons, but this very simplicity also opens up room for almost endless functionality. For this piece I have virtualized this instrument in Max-Msp and added ways to dynamically control it both functionally and visually.

The performance seeks to explore the gradiated region that sits between “live performance,” “djing” and “vjing.” The monome is clearly an instrument, but the use of pre-recorded samples is very reminiscent of the practice of Djing rather than live performance. The active control of the visual display enters the realm of Vjing, but the visual information (as you will see more clearly in future documentation) is largely controlled by the music itself.

Here’s another live performance of the piece:
Scape Live