The Big Apple
Greetings team. Here’s an update on my happenings for the summer:
I’ve taken down Matter of Fact’s free download status on Bandcamp and Last.fm to be included in a reverbnation-microsoft promotional thing. You can still download it free on their myspace page here:
http://www.myspace.com/windows?homepage=amanamun
I’m spending the summer working as a “digital media technologist” for Frog Design up here in New York. So far its been a good opportunity to boost my visualization and coding skills. Its also been an intense crash course in Python which has helped me a bit with the rewrite I’ve been doing of the Munome. I have a show booked up here for late July at a nifty little place called Monkey Town. I’m exited to be able to debut the Munome re-write up here in NYC where there’s a pretty active community of people who are interested in interactive art and music. If you know any folks up here who might enjoy please pass the word along.
I’m also in pre-production for a new record I’m currently referring to as ‘Lorica‘ which describes a body armor which is designed to look like the human form. I’m keeping things loose for now and am hoping to tie the ideas together using some of my new performance tools and in some ways blur the practice of performance with composition (which really isn’t that novel of an approach). Muchas smoochas!
Scapegoating Demonstration II
I uploaded some footage taken of my performance at the ‘Touch My Project’ Interactive Art show at the University of Georgia here. Thanks again to everyone who made it out, it was fun to finally have all the pieces in place. I’m hoping to do some more official documentation highlighting the new features of the munome sometime in the future, so peel those eyes.
Also feel free check out Scapegoating Demonstration I.
Dont Miss
Just some of the latest juice. Thanks Flagpole!
“Aman Amun: Brian McGaw, AKA Aman Amun, might be something of a prodigy. Although I haven’t seen his work yet, the glow in his eyes when he talks about his musical endeavors is invigorating, and his elaborate plans have impressed me more than any press release that’s come across my desk. As a student of interactive new media, he has been able to use his major as an outlet for his experimentations. So it’s fitting that his first live performance is part of an interactive exit show at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. McGaw has basically hand-crafted a new interface for triggering and manipulating sounds. What you’ll see on Friday is McGaw singing and playing guitar with two screens behind him. One huge screen will feature the usual sorts of visual stimulation moving in conjunction with the music, while the smaller screen actually serves as an interactive instrument that McGaw has programmed to trigger, manipulate and record samples. In order to interact with this screen, he has designed a glove (sounds a little like the pre-Wii NES Power Glove) with LED lights embedded in each finger tip. The glove, combined with Wiimote Whiteboard technology and a program he wrote for his computer, will
be used to build each song. The circular nature of his work is fascinating: the music will make visuals and interacting with those visuals will make music. I cannot wait to see how this all comes together. I’ve had a glimpse of this kind of technology online, but it’s thrilling to know a student right here in town is on the cutting edge of electronic music. “If you go see someone like Daft Punk,” says McGaw,” you have no idea what they’re doing – pushing buttons in that huge pyramid of equipment. What I am trying to do is take something that’s normally hidden and show it to the audience in a way that’s aesthetically pleasing.” Many of the tracks will be based around tunes from his record Waxing, which you can download at www.amanamun.com. The showcase itself is called “Touch My Project” and it starts at 7 p.m. with Aman Amun going on stage around 9 p.m. This is a free event! (Lamar Doodd School of Art Room S150, Friday 1) “
Sound Drawing V1
Sound Drawing is an interactive study meant to explore what sound might look like were it to be visually represented as it comes out of your mouth. It is a miniature offshoot of a larger project that I’ve been working on which utilizes both face-tracking and sound visualization. Though unrelated, it coincidentally came about during Zach Lieberman’s short residency at UGA. Along with Golan Levin he created a similar project with the Hidden Worlds of Noise and Voice. With Sound Drawing, though, I wanted to make the study accessible to a larger audience and to give the user more control so it can be used more as a drawing tool than a self contained work of art.
With Sound Drawing V1 the sound that you make controls aspects of the drawing tool. The loudness determines the height, the brightness determines the width, and the pitch determines the color. Its fun to do it with multiple people because it draws in front of the mouth of all of the faces in the frame. Be careful about how close you get to the camera though because if part of the face is chopped off the software doesn’t recognize it and won’t draw. So if you want to draw real close to the edge of the frame you’ll have to move back.
I’m hoping to push the project onto the web before the end of the summer, but for now, if you have a web-cam and a microphone, you can download the apps and play around with it. Be sure to leave comments if its not working.
Download Sound Drawing Version 1.0 For Mac
Directions:
1) Click the download link above.
2) Unzip the folder containing the applications. Double Click OpenCV.dmg and install.
3) Open the sound_analysis application. Select “Audio” in the menu on the top left to start reading the audio. You can control the volume with the fader on the right if you need to.
4) Open the facetracking1.app.
5) Make noise and draw pictures!
Controls:
O – Outline
S – Save A Picture
F – Toggles Fullscreen Mode
R – Switch between an elliptical versus a rectangular drawing tip
C – Clear
Esc – Closes Program
Technical Jargon:
The facial tracking and drawing parts to the program were written in Processing. Thanks to Stephane Cousot for helping make it possible with his newest java port of opencv. The sound analysis is driven in Max/Msp by Tristen Jehan’s analyzer~ and Miller Pucket’s fiddle~. The two communicate with osc.
The Box
Over the course of the time I’ve spent putting together my live show for Aman Amun I’ve been compiling a massive list of things that might or might not go wrong during a performance. The technicality of the show that makes it unique and interesting also makes it unstable. I don’t particularly feel like working in an unstable climate, though, and I hate having to triple check everything to make sure things will run smooth.
Midway through the development of the project I stumbled across this tutorial on building a custom stompbox. I had been wrestling with how to get around the instability of the wii whiteboard software, and didn’t like having to always run back to the projection to activate/deactivate a sample and so forth. Having a stompbox controller therefor seemed ideal. It would give me an additional layer of functionality besides whats displayed, and I could do all of it while playing an instrument or singing at stage front.
With the help of Andrew Ferrer I built this equilateral hexagonal stomp box. Its built from a blue tooth wireless keyboard I bought for $25, the sides are made from some nice extra wood Andrew had lying around, the face with some random galvanized steel thrown out in the sculpture department of UGA, and the buttons were bought online. I spent a total of about $50. Not bad for a one-of-a-kind wireless controller.
The bulk of the project actually lay in the software I wrote to accompany it. I use it for everything from setting the tempo (with a tempo tap) to triggering individual rows on my sampler to changing patterns on my sequencer.
Spin the Coke
Summer of 2008 I worked for an interactive company in Atlanta called Sapient. While I was there one of my main projects was development of an iPhone app for Coca Cola. Download Spin the Coke for your iPhone. Its as free as those cream containers they offer at IHOP which i always pop all over myself with a fork.
Fractals Exploration
In highschool I spent some time in an independent study exploring fractals, l-systems, and in general the aesthetics of numbers in nature. These images are some of the results generated in Apophysis.
On the Ball
These past couple weeks have been busy busy busy. Two weeks ago I did an interview on the Positive Vibes radio show for UT Dallas’ Radio Station. http://radio.utdallas.edu/
It was my first interview for the Aman Amun project and despite my lack of ability to coherently describe what I do, things wen’t pretty well. Huzzah.
Tomorrow I’ll be doing an on air performance at WUOG here in Athens. The show’s called ‘Live in the Lobby’ and I’ll make an effort to demonstrate, to some degree, what electroacoutic means to me. You can tune in online, so doit: http://www.wuog.org/
I’ll also be promoting my first full-on live performance. Since this project qualifies under the category of performance art I’ll be doing it in conjunction with the Touch My Project interactive art show. If you exist and you have a passion bone in your body, then please come and bare witness. Free art, performances, and booze.
Back Breaking Spring Breaking Back
Heya Peoples, here’s an update on my most recent happenings:
As you might notice, The Background Noise is currently in the midst of a makeover. I still have some interactive javascript stuff I have yet to implement involving the elevator and have a bunch of work left to do on my portal and portfolio pages. I have been trying to wrap my head around utilizing the WordPress engine to power my site, and have finally granted it the functionality for commenting. I’m going to do my best to at least have most of my work listed on my portfolio page by the end of the month, and the site finished in total by early April.
For the past month or so I have also been exploring the worlds of processing and 3d rendering with openGL. In particular, I’ve built several variations of live music visualizers which I’m currently attempting to take a bit further. Here’s one of my preliminary images generated from a live performance of a song I wrote called “Opportunity Cost.”
The images which are generated change drastically with every progressive version of the program, so I’ll give the live visualization project an entry of its own on my portfolio page when its finished. By next week I should have a video for one of my songs incorporating head tracking with a generic webcam finished, and I’ll post that as well.
I also have a week and a half to take the Munome to the next level by incorporating the foot-controller I’ve been building with the help of Andrew, which gives me the ability to use live looping with several instruments and control my sequencer and sampler in some interesting ways. I’m going to make an effort to document that better than I did last time. In the mean time I’m playing a couple shows down in Austin with Crumbling Arches over my Spring Break. I’m also going to try and make a stop by the interactive portion of SXSW. If you read this and you’ll be there, shoot me an email. I might be lonely.
peaceout!
Scapegoating Demonstration
This is documentation for an interactive-art piece I call the munome which I am using as the backbone of the Aman Amun performance.
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.
Note that this is only a small fraction of what the Aman Amun performance entails, but it illustrates some of the other ideas I am actively experimenting with. 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.
Technical Details:
The Munome is running MLR and tr256 alongside Reason for the drums sounds. I am using Johnney Lee’s Wii Whiteboard to take the performance from behind the computer screen and place it out in front of the viewer.
I apologize for the video, audio, and performance quality. Expect more of all of the above in future documentation when time and equipment permits it. Thanks to midimeek, stretta, tehn, and the others of the monome community for helping make this possible. Thanks to Eric Marty and the others of the ARTX Dept. @ UGA for help with equipment and technical details. More to come.
http://www.amanamun.com
http://www.monome.org
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/project…
http://www.cycling74.com/