MPG- Interactive Shopping Cart

The Digital Arts program at Stetson University has a live audio/visual performance collective called MPG (Mobile Performance Group). I was in the group for the 08-09 school year and we did several performances around Florida, including opening for Gil Weinberg for a presentation at UCF. For this year's class of MPG, we designed an interactive shopping cart which controls both audio and visuals by touch. Grabbing a metal contact and then gripping the cart changes the resistance of the analog circuit; we then use this data to drive visual manipulations and synthesizers in Max/MSP Jitter. My part of the system received data from the arduino conncected to the cart and translated it into MIDI data before sending it to a couple of synths I designed.

AUDIO

Hosted at Dr. Nathan Wolek's site Low Key Digital Studio

"ABSTRACT – Mobile Performance Group is a collaborative, multimedia project involving faculty and students from Stetson University’s Digital Arts program. The group’s primary mission is to find new ways of presenting art outside of traditional venues. Since 2004, MPG has fulfilled this objective by presenting a number of site-specific performances at festivals and conferences throughout the country. For each performance, members of MPG collect sounds and video from a given locale using digital equipment, edit the material into libraries based on common traits and use these libraries as the basis for a structured improvisation using laptop computers and specialized controllers. Requiring students to design their own instruments for our collective improvisation system provides a platform for them to apply advanced musical concepts including sound synthesis, audio processing, algorithmic composition, and gestural control. This demonstration will address technical methods used and discuss how these reinforce learning objectives within our interdisciplinary university program." -Dr. Nathan Wolek

MOVIES 

PHOTOS

Here's the truly brilliant part of the patch, the mpg network patch that connects all of our computers and keeps us synced to a tempo and key signature. Any message can be sent across the network so we take advantage of that function by sending the data generated by the cart to my patch. You can see in the picture below, one of the outlets of the patcher connects to a route object which sends analog 1 (a1) and analog 0 (a0) connections from the arduino to my synths.

This is what's generating all the sound from the cart. you can see the analog data's range being scaled to an appropiate value for Nathan Wolek's chordmem object. This object interacts with the network patcher above to determine the range of MIDI values for a given key that it is able to use. By sending a streaming flow of data like an analog out from the arduino, we were able to get some very interesting sounds from this function. There is a basic sine wav synth with a delay as well as support for external software synths.

Finally, I was using one of the analog inputs to drive a peak/notch filter over one of the synthesizers for an interesting grainy wah effect.