WAV Shield Test from Noah King on Vimeo.

I ordered an Arduino WAVE shield kit that finally arrived in the mail. After several hours of soldering, the kit was assembled and I managed to get a Clipse song to playback through a small, low-power speaker. Now I’m ready to make my own personal audio player, though it may be the size of a lunch box. Not exactly an iPod killer.

I am interested in exploring different shapes and various trajectories of shapes, expressed within Processing. This study looked at spiral forms, defined by the radius of the overall form, as well as the radius of the round brush size. Spirals are drawn in different colors and random diameters around a common center point. Clicking the mouse relocates the center point.

Colored Spiral Vortex from Noah King on Vimeo.

Visit this link for the Live Processing Sketch.

Last summer I explored several data visualization projects, one of which looked at the intervals in between prime numbers. Without any programming experience it was quite tedious to make all the calculations and drawings one cell at a time. This week I have gained the ability to parse large data files and extract the data from within, so I thought I would revisit this project and fully automate it. Below is a screen shot of the final image and a video of the program running. I will work on this more to add color and produce exponentially larger printouts, possible pushing the dataset up to one million prime numbers.

Frequency of Primes – Small Size from Noah King on Vimeo.

This is a visualization of the first 1600 prime numbers and the spaces in between them. The left margin of any colored block is one prime number, and the right margin is the next prime number. The width of the block therefor shows the space between the two, specifically the number of non-prime integers that occur between the two primes. The colors are automatically selected by the software to put visual emphasis on the largest intervals and to help visually identify repeating intervals.

Frequency of Primes – Medium Size from Noah King on Vimeo.

This is a visualization of the first 15,500 prime numbers and the spaces in between them.

Instrument Test 1 from Noah King on Vimeo.

After installing a sound library on the Arduino, I have begun to conceive musical instruments with body-gesture inputs. This simple test was to create a Theramin-like instrument that plays different notes based on the distance between your hand and the device.

This is the first successful Processing sketch using object-orientated-programming. Adding a bit of random to a 2-dimensional array of colored squares, the oscillating pattern of color change degrades over time until the whole window appears to be random (this takes several minutes). I still haven’t thought of a way to make this interactive.

To watch the actual program, click this link to the Live Processing Sketch

Processing – Interactive Drawing Application from Noah King on Vimeo.

This processing application is the first one in which I have successfully used functions. In the past I have used the controlP5 library to add a user-controlled variable to the top level of the sketch. This time I explored writing my own code to have fully-interactive, user controlled settings. This allows for several distinctively different drawing methods to be bundled into one program and accessed by clicking on buttons and sliders. The end drawing experience is decent, but mostly this was about the UI and the organization of the functions. I hope to program the sliders as objects, and then have many more variables to control, like color saturation and brightness, drawing tool shape, eraser, etc.

To try out the program yourself, follow this link for the Live Processing Sketch .

Source Code Here

Robotic Drummer – Solidworks design workflow from Noah King on Vimeo.

The second attempt at the Robotic Drummer project began on the computer in Solidworks. First I built a library of common parts, like the servos and switches, and then I designed a way to efficiently get the parts to assemble together. This helped work around some of the construction problems I had run into the week before, and also took out a lot of the guess work of getting parts to combine together in a strong and light-weight configuration. Once the CAD version was complete, I used it to make measurements off of, which lead to a problem-free day of fabricating the physical model.

Robotic Drummer – 4 servo configuration, pre-test setup from Noah King on Vimeo.

Working off of the CAD data, I built the pot-switch controller box and daisy-chained together the servo motors into the two arm setup. There was a lot of wiring and assembling to do, so I shot this video after finishing the setup of the parts and before official sending code to the arduino and seeing if anything worked.

Robotic Drummer – 4 servo test from Noah King on Vimeo.

Last week I assembled some code to get the 2 servos to move and be controlled by the POT switches. In this test, I expanded the code to work with four motors and four switches. After sending it to the Arduino, the robot worked fine, except for some loose connections between the board and the motors. I plan to solder these terminals so that they are not so loose. Additionally, solenoid actuators need to be added to the end of the arms so that a drum stick can get fired down towards a drum surface.

I am particularly interested in created computation based art-making tools. This processing sketch is a drawing tool that creates circles of different colors (randomly selected) and different sizes (based on the speed of the mouse) that follow the position of your mouse. Click the mouse to start and stop drawing.

These captured frames show some of the images that can be created.

image 1

image 2

image 3

Circle Drawing Tool – Live and in Action from Noah King on Vimeo.

By moving the mouse quickly or slowly, the types of circles being made are drastically different. When the mouse moves off the screen and then re-enters, enormous circles are made that almost take up the whole screen. Turning drawing mode on and off by clicking the mouse gives the user that ability to make very deliberate strokes.

Live Processing Sketch
Source Code

Working on this collaborative project with Fu was a lot of fun. He has a design sensibility that is very playful and humorous, so together we built on his character from last week to make it much more interactive and funny. Overall, I think we were very successful!

Mostly I contributed the swinging hammer component. It all began with a simple test to see if I could get an object to rotate.

Live Processing Sketch of Hammer Test
Source Code of Hammer Test

Once this hammer motion was added into the joint sketch, there was a bit of tweaking to get it to work with his objects, to activate it with a button, and to animate the aftermath of his character being struck.

Fu + Noah make a Robot fly from Noah King on Vimeo.

Live Processing Sketch of Final Interactive Project
Source Code

One group of musicians and music producers I have a great respect and appreciation for is The Neptunes, aka Pharell Williams and Chad Hugo.  From what I’ve read, they have an unorthodox process for making music.  They develop their songs using live instruments, but then record and master their songs using entirely digital, synthesized sound.  This gives them the crisp, perfect sounds they are famous for.  However, I find this process to be counter intuitive, especially as someone who is not formally trained to play live instruments.

My idea for the Fantasy Project is to create a Robotic Drummer who takes an input stream of notes / sounds and plays them on a real drum set.  In essence, this is the opposite of what the Neptunes do, and I suspect that it would make the experience of recording music with live instruments more accessible to people, like myself, who do not possess such skills.

Watching a human play the drums can be quite amazing.  In the below video, an experienced drummer wows the viewer.

Reggae/DNB from Xtruist Art on Vimeo.

In this video, a human drummer dsiplays his sense of rhythm, technical precision, and stylized playing. Much of this is possible because of the complex movements of the human arm and because of the sophistication of the human brain. My design is to take the thinking from our brains and supplement it with the dexterity and precision of Robotic arms.

Robotic Drummer – Motion Study from Noah King on Vimeo.

A human arm is quite complex in the way that it moves. This movement can be simulated using a robotic arm in three sections. Using 7 servos for 7 axes of movement, a full range of motion would be achievable.

This design could either work in real-time with a keyboard with each key mapped to each drum strike, or the device could have a pre-recorded drum sequence programmed into it and then it could play back the sounds.