The decrease in posts is mostly due to the sad fact that I lost my digital camera a couple weeks ago. It's a sweet Canon SD1000, if you happened to pick it up off the road at yonge and cumberland.
Moving on. We just got back from Montreal, where the PureData patch was tested successfully (however with a few hiccups). The testing process helped me in my decision to some day soon become a MAC person. The 'brain' of the audio installation just can't be setup on my poor old Toshiba laptop. Thankfully, our arduino wizard and friend Mike Lanctot has offered his Mac laptop for the evening of the event, which by the way, is this Saturday. That's 5 more dandies.
Yesterday we saw the successful completion of the box frames despite Rod's decision to quit drinking coffee. Today was meant to be spent covering most of the boxes in vapour barrier and bubblewrap, but it's a bit wet, and it looks as though it'll be wet until friday. Indoor Berry. Before moving the boxes inside, we couldn't resist taking a few pics, adding to the now extensive repertoire of interim documentation.
DandyBerry is now made up of 3 different sizes of boxes, each corresponding to what's inside them. The original square base hosts the speakers, with a new 18"x30" box type housing the microphones and thirdly, a larger square box with one side open, to allow people to walk inside the bubble-wrapped boxes. The result will diversify the volumes and voids, as well as allow people to experience how fun it is to be inside these boxes, something we discovered very early on.
The following plan will be used as a "working drawing" for the remainder of the planning process:
Mike is currently working on a second light prototype with 3 different colours of LED that respond to volume and frequency, so a high pitch sound would trigger different lights than a lower pitched sound. We also discussed positioning the 3 different lights in a way that forms an anamorphic pattern, aligning from a particular viewpoint and forming an image of some kind.
Our friend Etienne Noreau-Hebert has been working on the software that will be handling the audio input and output. He's using PureData, a fairly minimalist program that works with lines and boxes which direct the audio. We just love the flowchart-like diagrams that it produces:
We're testing the setup very soon with only the audio equipment. In addition to debugging, we're looking forward to how interesting the bare guts of DandyBerry will look. Picture Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet in a room with Phil Spector's Wall of Sound.
