Barcinski & Jeanjean » Sound

FITC Installation Online Simulation & Source Code

Barcinski & Jeanjean — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:39:00 +0000

This is a modified version of our interactive installation featured at FITC Amsterdam. The actual bluetooth presence service has been replaced by a scripted simulator which randomly adds and removes people from the installation. Enter your name in the popup field in the bottom and you will be playing an instrument too!

As promised before the source of this installation can be downloaded here. Feel free to modify and use the source. All we ask is, if you do use it, document it somehow and post a comment back here. Thanx.

Interactive Installation at FITC Amsterdam

Barcinski & Jeanjean — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:41:19 +0000

We are proud to announce our interactive installation at the FITC Amsterdam event. The installation will be installed in the Felix Meritis building in Amsterdam during the whole 3 days of the conference (Feb 24 – Feb 26) and is also accessible to visitors without tickets for FITC. So, if you missed out on the tickets before they sold out, you can still experience it.

The toilet-space will be reacting to the presence of Bluetooth devices. Each person entering with a Bluetooth device will add a new randomly selected instrument to the music. Which means that whenever nobody is present, no music is playing. The more people present, the more instruments will form the music.

The musical elements are specifically composed for this installation. The arrangement, however, is yet to be made by the visitors to the toilets.

The graphical part of the installation visualizes the presence of Bluetooth devices and displays which instrument has been assigned to which person. This way, each one can see and identify which instrument he or she is playing in the arrangement.

The installation uses the Roomware server to acquire a list of detected Bluetooth devices and the 3D visualization is built with Papervision3D.

So head off to FITC Amsterdam, switch on your Bluetooth and join the music. More in a next post.

Flash Sequencer with Popforge

Barcinski & Jeanjean — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:20:39 +0000

We were working on a website project for which we wanted the music to be sequenced in Flash rather then loading an mp3, which would allow us to do realtime manipulation of the music sound and bpm. The logical place to start in that case is the wonderfull Popforge Library of André Michelle and Joa Ebert. We needed a sequencer engine to play our music in our project and a GUI to create the patterns in as a production tool.

André Michelle’s open-source FL-909 drummachine already contained a lot of functionality we needed. But as the FL-909 is based on the original Roland TR-909 hardware interface, functionality and soundbank, it was missing the flexibility and overview we needed for our production sequencer. So we modified the engine and GUI to add what we needed. The GUI now offers a complete graphic overview of the pattern as you program it. Triggers have individual velocity allowing for greater dynamics. And the samples are loaded externally one by one, rather then being embedded in one big chunk, allowing to manage the downloading process.

The application certainly doesn’t look as nice as André’s FL-909 but that wasn’t our main concern, since the GUI would only be used by us during production and only the engine would run tranparently in the background of our project, providing the soundtrack. There were a few more modifications we wanted to implement, such as mute groups, a compressor behind the accent knob, the ability to sequence the pattern bank, to only name a few. However, the death of the SOUND_COMPLETE event (read the article and sign the petition) renders these efforts useless for commercial projects for the moment. And besides that, André Michelle and Joa Ebert are working on a complete Audio Suite in Flash which most certainly will also contain a very flexible sequencer. Have a look >>