Project no. 2 – Sample Theremin

The piece. Inside each of the glass fixtures are an infrared sensor.

These sensors can be manipulated with any object, including hands. (See: hands)

Description

• • Hanging from the ceiling is a utilitarian-looking chandelier, made out of rectangular pieces of metal. The chandelier points in four directions, with small bowls of frosted glass at the ends. Inside of these bowls are infrared distance sensors, which are wired through the arms and into an Arduino Uno in the base of the light fixture, connected into a laptop. When the laptop sends sound to four speakers surrounding the audience, the four sensors can be manipulated by any object that blocks light, affecting both volume and a combination of pitch and playback speed.
• 

  In this performance, my wallet and jackets became essential towards interacting with the sensors.

  • In this particular performance, the playback was a sample from Hildegard von Bingen’s ‘Voices of Angels”.

Progress Reflection

In addition to Activating the Body, I am also taking a class centered around the Max program called “Twisted Signals”, taught by Jesse Stiles. In an effort to combine the two workloads into one (considering I have no prior experience with Arduino, Max, or gutting found chandeliers), this performance is the first iteration of a result. As a means of giving myself enough time to create something functional, I spent most of my time front-loading the coding and sensor-testing aspects of this piece, which I thanked myself for as the presentation drew closer. Shown in the code below is a delineator (“!”) meant to help funnel information into its proper place, an aspect which truly took a grueling week to figure out how to implement, as no one was either available to show me, or able to answer it already online. This became one of the most rewarding takeaways from this project; being able to suffer, and then figure out the answer to my question on my own. With that experience, I feel far more confident in approaching aspects of physical computing that I do not have as much familiarity with.

The accursed @seperator attribute, key to all knowledge and wisdom.

This process also allowed me to explore just how much I can manipulate found objects. Whereas with the first project, the electronics were “embedded” within the headlight and a cardboard box, I went to far greater lengths to gut the chandelier before rewiring it with the sensors.

The original wiring for the chandelier.

The guts, the gore, and all else that was inside this thing.

There are some portion of the project that didn’t turn out… ‘as planned’ is harsh, but I would have liked to see some more headway on aspects of the piece in several regards. In particular, I was beginning to figure out functionality to move throughout any particular sample. In an earlier version of the Max patch, I created a metronome that could also make a BPM, so as to make loops of a certain number of measures. However, I still have a lot to learn about working with buffered audio in Max before the theremin could reliably mess around with this.

Pressing and releasing the + button in rhythm would end up giving you a BPM, and you can select between 2, 4, 8, and 16 bars to loop in the waveform viewer further below. Also pictured is a way to record through a microphone into the buffer, named friend, because it is my friend.

I may actually continue working on this, though, which makes me happy. The feedback from the critique session allowed me to think of this in far more interesting performance contexts, and combining furniture/home appliances with music has started to pop up in other ideas I’ve been having recently. Maybe this is the start of something!

Arduino Code

/*Project no. 2 - Sample Theremin
Padra Crisafulli

Description: This code allows for the four infrared sensors to communicate 
with the program Max to manipulate sound. Max reads the printed serial data
and delineates the exclamation marks out to funnel each piece of sensor data 
into its desired place within Max itself.

The four pins are named after different colors for convenience sake only, 
as the chandelier they were wired through was so tight that tracing the wiring
without color coding would be a task meant for the devil's enjoyment.
*/

int analogWhite = A0;
int analogBlue = A1;
int analogYellow = A3;
int analogGreen = A4;

void setup() {
  pinMode(analogYellow, INPUT);
  pinMode(analogWhite, INPUT);
  pinMode(analogBlue, INPUT);
  pinMode(analogGreen, INPUT);
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop(){
  Serial.print(analogRead(analogWhite));
  Serial.print("!");
  Serial.print(analogRead(analogBlue));
  Serial.print("!");
  Serial.print(analogRead(analogYellow));
  Serial.print("!");
  Serial.println(analogRead(analogGreen));
}

Max 8 Code (Compressed)

<pre><code>
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-----------end_max5_patcher-----------
</code></pre>