Friday 27th March, Jon's Place again...

Today's activities:

• I spent the morning creating an instrument in Kontakt which creates a realistic thunder sound.  I also started work on an organic ice sound which i will hopefully complete over the weekend.
• Jon and Gareth spoke to Kingsley Ash about the visuals and got a little further with the L-system patch.  Jon also demonstrated his other visual patch.
• Some more amendments were made to the presentation and videos were added.  We also talked through the structure of the presentation and agreed to meet at nine on monday ready for our time slot at half nine. 

Thursday 26th March, Jon's Place...

Today the group got together to work collectively on a few things, this included:

1. Working on the Work In-Progress presentation in PowerPoint, constructing the slides and ordering who would talk and about what.
2. Completing the content for the presentation including filming of Gareth demonstrating the audio ambience's merging one to another.
3. Jon C will create a further two instruments in Kontakt to be included with the others which have been created to demonstrate 'live' in the presentation.  These will include thunder sounds and 'organic growing ice sounds.'
4. A basic tin design has been created for the prototype tin which will be presented at the presentation.
5. Jon D is still struggling with the visual side of things and will meet Kingsley Ash with Gareth tomorrow to discuss other avenues.
6. Gareth is going to go to Maplin to buy the LED device we need to create the glove interface.
7. We are meeting tomorrow afternoon to prepare and finalize the presentation.

My activities

Here is what i have been up to recently...

- I have archieved the footage we took during our visits and the Kontakt map demos (Jon i still need those screen grab movies)

- Putting together a little montage of footage to show during the presentation.

- Workin through Jitter tutorials and trying to find objects in there that will be of use.

- Contacted Jer Thorpe about the possibility of gettin his Processing code (still no reply)

- Paul Emery still hasnt got back to me so ill be tryin to get hold of him today. Need to speak to him about the possibility of using video files as opposed to Jitter patches etc.

- Meetin Kingsly Ash on Friday (27th) about the GL libraries in Jitter and trying to get my head round those.

Hope you're all good.

J

Great News Guys...

Hi guys,

Just thought I'd let you know what the situation is with visits and filming when we get back from Easter.  The Lumen exhibition space is confirmed, we have the space on Monday 27th and Tuesday 28th April.  Even better, the Dales School has confirmed we can go in and film it in action there with some children.  We have been given the chance to go in a view the space they have and discuss what the procedure will be.  Thats on Tuesday 21st April at 1.30pm.  We then go back on Thursday 30th April to actually set it up and film it in action!

So, we definitely need a camera, mic and minidisc recorder for the week commencing 27th April so we can film it and record interview feedback.  Also a projector, screen, speakers, audio interface and pc/mac for the installation itself.  I can provide the speakers, audio interface and mac if we need it.  I'll chase up my friend Dave about a projector in case we can't source one from Uni.  I can see the mic, minidisc recorder and camera being in great demand at that point too so sourcing some alternatives could be beneficial.

I'm going to get back to creating insect sounds.  Im working on BumbleBee sounds! Bzzzzzz

What I've been up to so far this week...

Just thought I'd pt up what I've been up to over the last few days.

• I've completed two instruments in Kontakt which create realistic rain and wind sounds for the colder seasons in the piece.
• I've started work on another instrument which will create realistic insect sounds for the summer seasons. These raw recordings include de-tuned violin strings for bees, blowing pipes for crickets, and rattling snare drums for swarming sounds.
• These will all be edited and processed in Kontakt.
• I aim to create instruments which will create thunder and lightning sounds and 'wintery' sounds.
• I have been in touch with a contact at 'The Dales School' in North Yorkshire with the view to going in and filming the product in action with users of different learning difficulties.
• I am confirming this with them tomorrow but it looks all but certain that we will have the go ahead to do this.
• The exhibition space at Lumen has been confirmed for the 27th and 28th of April, i will look to get the school session after this date.

The past few days and the audio patch

Over the past couple of days I've been working on the Audio patch for the See Zen system and carrying out more tests with the Wii Remote of which still I'm only getting it to do basic tasks as my attention has been focussed more in getting the audio systems ready to implement the samples.

Yesterday I build a 'core' sample player which should save a lot of time implementing samples into the system. This allows the sample to be stopped and played back from the beginning, stopped and played back from the last position so in effect a pause function, varied pitch and volume, panning and loop on/off. The sample can also be routed to any audio effect within the system making it very flexible to use and increase the speed of implementing the sounds massively.

I also realised that I'd not created an audio envelope so I've created a very simple ADSR function which works quite nicely. All of these systems have been build to try and have similar functionality to Native Instruments Kontakt. The benefit of building our own systems as opposed to using Kontakts built in systems that the opportunities are almost limitless and offers a variety of options for real time modulation, overall making the sytem much more interactive and exciting and hopefully not causing too much load on the poor old CPU (we will cross our fingers).

What have I been doing over the last few weeks

Well I seem to have already neglected this blog site so think I best get my act together with it.

I have been recently working in MaxMSP building all the systems ready for the audio elements of the project. This has included;

Building simple, yet effective DSP effects, including filters, reverbs, delays and an interesting stutter patch which may not have any relevance but may create some interesting results. These are still in very basic form but are ready to be developed further once tests have been made with the samples which we are using which Jon and Tom have both been hard at work editing.

As well as the effects I have set up a variety of sample and loop players, some adding variation to pitch and volume everytime the sample is played back. This is a development of work I completed in previous university modules, as is quite a lot of work I have completed so far. In addition to this I want to create a system where effects parameters modulate themselves randomly for some ambient sounds. My vision of the ambiences is that they sit back and set the scene while more obvious sounds like birds singing become the interactive elements. This will be up for discussion on Monday when we meet again and hopefully have the samples fully integrated.

I've also been looking into ways in which the user may interact with the system and the Wii remote is becoming more and more promising. I've been in touch with a second year student with recommendation from Bal Singh but think I've found all the answers I've been looking for on Jonny Lee's website (http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/). The top video is a perfect starting point. Hopefully the techniques he uses can be translated into MaxMSP and the See Zen project quite seamlessly.

So far I have purchased one IR LED (you owe me 20p guys!) to run tests with the Wii Mote. If all runs smoothly I will go ahead and purchase an IR Illuminator (http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=225027) or something similar which the remote can sit between.

I think thats all for now, I have received the Bridlington Samples from Jon which are superb and a great starting point to the implementation of the product.

What I've been up to...

Today I have gone through all the site-recordings from our Bridlington trip and saved all the samples ready for putting into MAX.  I've also created two instruments in Kontakt, one which creates a a wide range of rain sounds and one which creates different wind textures.  These can then be played, recorded and cut up to be put into MAX. I think I'm going to create some more instruments, for example one which can create a realistic insect sound, and another which will create more abstract winter sounds.

Group Discussion - Tuesday 17th March

Today Jon C, Tom and Gareth briefly discussed the construction of the audio in the installation.  Ideas discussed include;

• How the raw audio samples will be saved and organised
• The format and the bit rate of the audio files after editing
• The construction of the MAX patches within which the audio samples will be placed
• Gareth will commence with a patch that works in a similar way to the basic functions within Kontakt
• The audio patch will allow for around 3 to 4 layers of ambience however this may change
• The audio patch will also include a more descriptive audio element which will highlight the visuals and also change with the seasons

The aim is to have all the audio in the system created and implemented into MAX before the work-in-progress presentation. Hopefully we will have some sort of visual element in place as well.

Roundhay Park, Site-recording

Yesterday the group travelled to Roundhay park on the outskirts of Leeds to complete some site-recording.  Sounds recorded were;

• Peaceful ambiences with a variety of bird sounds
• Swans and geese
• Light winds
• Falling water at different rates
• Streams with woodland ambience

As well as recording these sounds video was recorded for the making of dvd.  This totaled to around 2 and a half hours.

Bridlington, Site-recording

Yesterday we went to Bridlington as a group to carry out audio site-recordings and filming.  This entailed:

• 38 minutes of audio collected. 
  
• Waves against rocks, sand, walls close up and from a distance.  
  
• Recordings of seagulls, close up and from a distance.
  
• Sounds of beach, footsteps on sand.
  
• A short description by Gareth of the activities carried out, filmed with sound recording. 
  
• Filming including skys, sea, cliffs, seagulls.
  

The activities lasted around 3 hours in length.

Group Meeting - Tuesday 10th March

Minutes and Activities...

1. Both Jon's completed the product logo and it has been uploaded.
   
2. The team brochure form was also uploaded after being completed as a team.
   
3. The technical specification sheet for the showcase and final presentation was completed and handed in and Jon's Macbook Pro was pact tested.
   
4. A contact in LeedsMet was contacted about the relevant forms needed to be completed in case we product test in schools.
   
5. Each member now needs to complete their individual plan for upload on friday.
   

Group Meeting-Monday 2nd March, 1hour

Minutes of the Meeting

1. The whole group discussed the project plan, brochure form and the new set of deadlines including three for next friday.
2. Work began on a gantt chart for the project plan, started writing down all the different tasks that would need to be included.
3. Both Jon's have agreed to create a mood board for the visuals of each season, create the logo and colour scheme for the brochure form and also a website design.
4. Gareth agreed to create a website once the design had been completed.
5. Gareth and Tom have agreed to start working on an interface for the installation considering the advice from tutors with regards to the wiimote of glove idea.
6. Tentative plan drawn up for recording the audio elements before the end of next week.
   
7. The tutors suggested that the plan for the project be completed by next monday to allow them to see it.

New Blog...

Here' the new team's new blog where we can put up ideas, generally keep in touch and write down our group meetings.  We can also keep a track of how many hours we've dedicated to the project.

I thought it'd be better to choose a simple template until we've got a logo and a colour scheme for our product.