A couple weeks ago, I participated in a terrific event called “DIY Instrument Tailgate Party” at Stanford University, hosted by Stanford Lively Arts and Thingamajigs, and Oakland-based arts group. All sorts of instruments were presented by a wide selection of Bay Area experimentalists. Musical devices were shown and played, using high tech Kinect camera vision, motor-driven robots, a giant tesla coil, a plate of steel, and even cardboard and plywood.

I made one of the smaller devices, using our Brain controller and Builder parts. Using 16 photoresistors pulled from a Jameco grabbag, I wired them into the Turn boards and made a simple Max patch to create the Photosynthesizer. Operated by light and shadow, it was a nice experiement in building an alternative controller, and a good example of a weekend project for the Brain.
Here’s some pictures and videos that explain how to get something like a photoresistor working with the Brain, as well as some photos of the event itself.

First, here’s a guide to hooking up a photoresistor to the brain, and getting MIDI output. While I specifically show a photoresistor in this movie, the basic premise of using a voltage divider (aka pulldown resistors) is true for any sort of 2-lead sensor, like a flex sensor, temperature sensor, or others.

Once I made sure it worked on the breadboard, I had to move it to the Turn board, and repeat 16 times. Of course, I wanted to make sure that I had everything right before I soldered it down. Here’s a tip on making sure you have your wires hooked up right to the Breakout board before you solder it down:

While building, I took some pictures of progress. One thing I did was to put the breakout boards underneath the 4×4 Turn board, which made it pretty easy to put together and reduced the footprint. It also gave the device some “legs” so it would sit stably on a table. Following those pictures are just a few pics from the event and a couple of movies. Enjoy!

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projects by Peter

HITORI TORI makes an unexpected cameo on Lie to Me?

This 400 bpm jam is intended as an introductory sequence for one of my live sets. It’s basically just a minute long build up with an inclining tone at the end, that should ultimately drop into a song.

The red instance has got all of the melodies and the green instance carries different drum banks which have been alloted to different tracks. I’ve deliberately set the red instance at a lower LBP (lines per beat) so that there’s a little more time for me to make a seamless jump in song position from the part with the acid synth into the last 8 patterns of the song.

This post was submitted by Hitori Tori.

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projects by Hitori Tori

cc licence: D'Arcy Norman

For many of you out there, this should find you on a holiday, and I hope you reserved some playtime for your Livid Controller! I’ve been working on some simple devices in Max, and today I worked up a simple 8 row step sequencer for our controllers. Yes, all of them: Ohm64, block and Code.
Scaling back from the hyper-featured Livd Step, this patch provides the basics for turning any row of the grid into a single note step sequencer. It is sync’ed to the main tempo, and each row can be assigned any of several note time values (such as sixteenth, dotted quarter, eight note, and so on). Of course, you’ll need Cycling 74′s Max/MSP (4 or 5) to use this.
Since this coincided with a forum request on how to control LEDs in Max for a step sequencer from a Max 4.6 user, I took the time to convert the Max 5 patch to a Max 4 patch. I hope there are others still using version 4.6 that find this helpful!
Besides the step sequencing, these patches also provide all the necessary infrastructure to automatically detect and setup any of our controllers in Max, as well as control LEDs via sysex (it’s basically the same stuff that can be found in the Livid+Max patch in our downloads sections, but in a really useful context).
Rather than use an 8×8 matrix control, I used 8 separate 8×1 matrix controls in Max, providing more freedom to work this stuff into your own patches.
I didn’t provide any cool sounds with it. I simply use the operating system’s built-in GeneralMIDI synth, using the drum patch on channel 10. I’ll leave it to you to make your own cool sounds with this.  In the same spirit, I designed this so you can add a lot of your own ideas to step sequencing and hopefully make this your own crazy stepper: you could add randomness, link the knobs to different parameters, or even work it into Max For Live. I hope you ping back what you make!
Download the Max 4 and 5 files here: http://lividinstruments.com/dl/Livid-BasicStepSeq.zip

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news, projects by Peter

The Eyebeam Roadshow is what you get when you mix a rock & roll tour with the talented fellows and resident artists of Eyebeam. It is an event organized by the artists as a way to bring their work to places where it would not otherwise be seen. The Roadshow consists of talks and workshops that are designed specifically to blow minds. So far, the Roadshow has traveled to over 20 locations in the U.S. and UK, spreading open source art and technology wherever it goes. The Roadshow has been invited to 01SJ as part of the Out of the Garage program – a week+ program where independent artists, designers, architects, engineers, programmers, and corporate and academic research programs will work in San Jose’s 80,000 square foot South Hall to create projects for exhibition, performance, provocation, and interaction. More info here: http://01sj.org/2010/exhibitions/out-of-the-garage/ + http://bit.ly/roadshow_01SJ

San Jose program highlights include:
- a workshop for collaboratively making a Rube Goldberg installation that will be featured at 01SJ in the Roadshow space,
- a stand-up comedy meets nerdy code workshop,
- making DIY personal power generators, and
- a walking tour of the Alviso salt flats harvesting pharmaceutical overflow.
- learning to make your own firefox plugins

We would love for the Livid Community to join us in this makefest! More info here: http://bit.ly/roadshow_01SJ

This post was submitted by stephanie.

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projects by stephanie

Just jamming away here with a song I’m currently working on. Tried to make an appropriate intro for it by juggling some vocal samples and jungle loops on the Ohm’s 8×8 grid. I used a second instance of Renoise for all the beat juggling and then switched into the actual song by triggering its first pattern to play.

This post was submitted by hitori tori.

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projects by hitori tori