projects...

looks like 2010 will be bookended by postings. It's been a year to forget in many ways.

current projects (or things I've been asked to look into):

* For Love: a piece of software to convert text into morse code & play the resulting audio. For some reason or other, I started doing this with Processing (pulling in various other Java language items). It seemed like a good idea at the time, as a framework that encompassed transferring data via http, reading & cleaning up text & generating audio. Ultimately, this app is just a client for a backend which aggregates & stores messages sent from web forms, text message, tweets, whatever, in a predictable format.

* For Money: a package of scripts to generate a quite large brochure-style website from catalogues (manufacturers, items, pricing etc) in an easy-to-edit form (such as Excel spreadsheet). The plan is to employ the site's existing structure & styling but to re-engineer how the content ('the information') is maintained & updated. This is like a classic case of 'separation of content & presentation' that used to be all the rage a few years ago when XML was touted as the next big thing.

I'm using - as a model (& it's the reason I started the conversation to begin with) - something similar I created using Perl & XSL transformation several years ago, which was a solution to create several fiddly table-based webpages that matched data & download links for a file repository at my previous employer.

* sort-of For Money: building new mail/file etc. servers to replace a few boxes for a long-standing associates. I'll probably end up re-cabling their network onsite as well...after the renovations... As this is based upon 64-bit Centos linux, that could have it's intriguing/frustrating aspects as well as this is going out there the the bleeding-edge for some aspects .

* For Love - or something like that: I recently completed building an Octomod & it seems to be working fine. This is a device to convert digital commands (from a computer, via USB) to analogue control voltages. In the event that someone wants to say, use this from an application like Ableton Live they need to map MIDI data from to the OSC data that the device understands & converts. Max patches & also Max 4 Live device to facilitate this conversion are a starting point. Ultimately, a standalone app (could be created using Max) which does this work would be the best for people who don't own either Max or Live.

audio filters & such

I am quite interested in a device like the M Resonator

This machine is essentially a couple of filters in a feedback network. Notwithstanding any particular sound qualities their filters might have,it's a reasonably effective (& old!) idea for shaping music...and it would be fairly easy to build a crappy knock-off myself, using DIY. After all, there's plenty of schematics for the building blocks available on the web.

It's missing MIDI control though. That would be a cute arduino/mididuino project. Edit: in the sense of adding MIDI control to a filter - not simulating audio-rate DSP via an Arduino.

I'm a bit of a Korg Kaoss pad enthusiast but some kind of multi-band resonant filter - with envelope control would be a real nice thing to have as a way of shaping the spectrum of music. Actually, sounds like I'm describing a modular synth now. Especially something a little like the Doepfer A 127 module