Electric fingers, warm hands

Huzzah! There's a video up of my Ignite talk from last month. There was a lot I wanted to say about electronics and music -- perhaps too much for the time allotted -- but hopefully some of it stuck.

Last Friday, Pokey and I went to see Jazari - a one-man band comprised of Patrick Flanagan and his drums (solenoid-driven djembe/bongos, servo'd shakers, claves, etc.). Flanagan deftly achieves his goal of making electronic performance visually stimulating: the music is complex and thrilling; the machines are mesmerizing. One half of his controller (made from a Wiimote) is adorned with supa-badass springbok horns. Check it out:

LEGIT.

From time to time, the overhead projector displayed the Max/MSP patch he was using. It was hugely complex, but probably less so when you understand it; Pokey then recommended me its open-source counterpart, Pure Data (Pd). It's pretty glorious; I recommend this tutorial for a running start.

[Side note about Patrick's gorgeous business cards: they are gorgeous. He burned his name and info into chips of Spanish cedar, the wood selected for its aroma. That's my kind of artist.]

My first Pd project was a patch that generates binaural beats, which can be changed on the fly while it's running. I'm a bit skeptical of this technique; it works on the proven fact that your brainwaves pulse at different rates when you concentrate or relax. The lower frequencies correspond to chilled-out states, all the way down to NREM sleep; the more alert and focused you are, the higher the frequency. Proponents of binaural beats posit that you can affect your disposition by syncing your brainwaves to frequencies pumped in through your ears. I've never gotten it to work, but then, I'm a Spanish major / hobbyist, not a scientist. So go figure.

People generally use binaural beats from the low end (delta waves) to normal "concentrating" frequency (beta waves). This encompasses a range from 2-4 Hz - that is, two to four pulses per second - up to about 30 Hz. But your ears can't hear frequencies that low, so this method uses a workaround: instead of listening to a single tone at 8 Hz, you hear two tones, one in each ear, 8 Hz apart. This creates an aural "wobble" effect, 8 times per second. (You have to use headphones in order to hear the two frequencies separately and get the wobble.)

Many binaural recordings are available on the internet, but most use higher-pitched frequencies, while I prefer lower tones around 120 Hz. Making my own is more fun, and more enjoyable than listening to tinny ear-wobbles over recorded rainforest noises. You can download my Pd patch on Posterous; again, I haven't had any results, but maybe you'll get something. I'll probably update the patch in a bit.

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Stay tuned for some knitting and crocheting... Michigan is getting cooooolllllddd.

ENOUGH!

Too many posts with no pictures! I OWE IT TO THE WORLD to share images of my stupid projects!

So here's one for you...

THE INVISI-RAY

On Tuesday, we at All Hands Active got our shiny new bylaws ratified (provisionally), then elected our Board of Directors, of which I'm one! To celebrate, I grabbed an old Energizer headlamp I'd been using as a bike light until it started corroding, and swapped out the white LEDs for IR ones. (This is the next step on my journey toward becoming a cyborg with augmented senses.)

Science Materials!

I found four of them in this box, three of which worked, which was just swell. They look pretty much the same as white LEDs...

yeah they look basically the same

The difference is that it's a lot harder to tell whether IR ones are on or off. I tested them with some button batteries and Roxanne's infrared eye. (Roxanne is a wheeled tower housing a CPU, a pair of speakers, a keyboard, a handheld mouse, an LCD monitor, a regular webcam, and an IR one. She stays logged into AHA's IRC channel and - when set up - takes a picture of the space every 30 seconds. She is our assistant and protector; she has a glorious future yet to come.)

This light is invisible to the unaided human eye.

I took out the three screws on the back of the case and set them aside. The back popped off very easily, and while the soldering iron warmed up, I took a spare LED and tested the white LEDs' connections to see which way they were hooked up, with the lamp switch on.

LED, as you probably know, stands for "Light-Emitting Diode". A diode is a component that allows current to pass through it one way, but not the other. So I had to hook up the LEDs in the right direction, or else they simply wouldn't turn on. With new LEDs, the positive leg is almost always cut longer than the negative one, but on a circuit board the leads have usually been cut close to the board. As it turned out, this headlamp had the white LEDs hooked up with the positive legs to the outside.

My IR LEDs were conveniently sized the same as the old white ones, so with some careful bending, they fit right back in the proper holes. (The middle one there shines red when the switch is moved in the opposite direction - like darkroom lamps, very convenient when one is standing in the dark for extended periods.)

The transformation complete, I put the housing back together and tested it. Here's what it looks like, switched off:

And switched on:

And switched on, through an IR camera:

Maahhhvelous! I got a bunch of purple-hued portraits of AHA! people (yay for locking people in dark bathrooms!), then documented the Zombie Walk a few days later. Results are here! A few samples:

Jacob Huge Beard displays the usual desaturation of black dyes.

Epic zombie dude's makeup is largely transparent, revealing the white base mask underneath.

Pokey's Gary Wilson lipstick is also invisible.

An advantage to shooting with invisible light: you can shine it right in people's eyes (for limited periods of time, of course).

Once more, the rest of the photos are available for browsin' on the Facebooks.