Wednesday, January 30, 2008

DLD 2008 - Digital gets Physical and Social

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Our made man, Ohad Eder Pressman reached to Speaker level at DLD* 2008, lecturing about connecting the Physical and Digital worlds.

Digital gets Physical session include Kati London, Julian Bleecker (NearFuture), Neri Oxman, Ohad Eder-Pressman and hosted by Kevin Slavin

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IL at DE

DLD conference is a blast of sharing ideas, thoughts and vision.
It was a great opportunity to meet GarageGeeks friends from all over the world:

JB Jean-Baptiste Labrune who creates our next generation of interfaces, RĂ©gine Debatty editor of the art/tech blog http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com

Regine and JB Pablos Holman Dan Dubno

Michael Reinboth from Compost records, Munich, kindly had a meeting with us and we discussed about various ways to integrate the GarageGeeks activities with the music industry in Germany.

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Sunday, January 20, 2008

Music Workshop - DIY Toy Music Controllers

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At this music workshop, we are creating modified toys music controllers that send their MIDI or Audio information to central audio and visual stations.

Reflections from this workshop

photos
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rafael_mizrahi/sets/72157603505744930/

videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4z5LKpeLZU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri4vpqTnP9A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd1H2T5uUqQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5raa-XiAFAo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S42jX6-n9K4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd1H2T5uUqQ

Date: 3 January 2008
Hosts: Rafael Mizrahi, Eyal ‘Person’ Sachar and Shira Miasnik

Schedule19:00 Garage Open: Prepare your "Basta".
20:00 Workshop agenda: Enough with Baby Einstein, its Baby Clubber time.
20:30 workshop starts

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Who should come?
* Experienced music technicians and interactive designer.
* The event is open for everyone. You can join others (see /write in the wiki http://wiki.garagegeeks.org) by helping take apart and stuff the musical toys with gadgets.

The Garage will be wired with MIDI, and Audio cables. Each station can choose from several methods of communication to the central stations Hub. Your Toy output can be connected to the central stations or to your Laptop, and from there, to the central stations.

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Ingredients: bring one or more of the followings:

  1. A Toy (or some device that you wish to convert into a controller)

  2. Sensors http://www.sensorwiki.org/index.php/Sensors

  3. Sensor interface board http://www.sensorwiki.org/index.php/Sensor_interfaces

  4. Parts - Assorted switches, potentiometers and other parts
    http://www.anti-theory.com/soundart/circuitbend/cb04.html

  5. Laptop

  6. Cables:MIDI, LAN, Audio and converter accessories.

  7. Tools: soldering iron, glue, etc’
    http://www.anti-theory.com/soundart/circuitbend/cb03.html

  8. USB Keyboard to take apart.


2165006711_e35be9978b.jpgHow to participate with low budget:
Here is a list of ingredients to build a Music Toy Controller for anyone who wish to participate but is not so skilled or equipped. A Toy wired with Keys from a USB keyboard sending keystrokes to a utility (MouseTrap) which translates them into MIDI messages, mapped by MIDI-OX into Ableton Live.
* Toy
* USB Keyboard to take apart (also a mouse can be used).
* Laptop
* Ableton Live Demo http://www.ableton.com
* MIDI utilities:
** Keyboard/Mouse to MIDI: MouseTrap http://www.humatic.de/htools/MouseTrap.htm
** MIDI virtual device: MIDI-OX http://www.midiox.com/?http://www.midiox.com/moxdown.htm
* switches, knobs, sliders to hook on the Toy
* wires, solder, glue gun.
* anything else you wish to do with your lovely musical Toy.

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Examples of participation (there can be more variations):

  1. Toy+MIDI board->central station.

  2. Toy+USB Keyboard->laptop->MIDI device or Audio->central station.

  3. Toy+phidgets->laptop->Audio->central station.

  4. Toy->laptop->MAX/MSP with MIDI module->MIDI device->central station.

  5. Toy+ Arduino with MIDI module->laptop or central station.


Recommended boards:

  1. MIDISense (MIDI) http://www.ladyada.net/make/midisense

  2. MIDITron (MIDI) http://eroktronix.com

  3. Arduino (Multi Purpose board USB) http://www.arduino.cc

  4. Phidgets (Sensors to USB) http://www.phidgets.com/index.php?module=pncommerce&func=itemview&IID=85

  5. Pocket Electronic (MIDI) http://www.doepfer.de/pe.htm

  6. Make Controller Kit (USB and OSC) http://www.makingthings.com/products/KIT-MAKE-CTRL


notes: Don’t buy a board without understanding what you are buying and how to operate it.
The board kits are pretty easy to build, but prepare them at home because it takes several hours to assemble a 50$ kit.

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Home Preparations:


  1. Get a Toy, disassemble it at home and look for ways to attach the sensors or potentiometers onto it.

  2. Decide how the toy will function? (MIDI, USB, Phidget, OSC, etc')

  3. Prepare your board and test it with the sensors or potentiometers.

  4. A handful of parts (knobs, slides, etc') that you can hook on the toy, bring extra, maybe others can use them.
    tour some electronic shops for such parts, or just take them from electronic junk you still didn't throw away.


Links

  1. List of electronic shops which also sell sensors http://www.garagegeeks.org/blog/?p=78

  2. List of music shops that sell music instruments http://www.act.co.il/index.php?action=shops


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Reading material


MIDI
Essential MIDI toolbox
Use to monitor midi messages, send midi from your keyboard, map midi devices and more.
MIDI-OX
http://www.midiox.com/?http://www.midiox.com/moxdown.htm
MIDI-Yoke
http://www.midiox.com/index.htm?http://www.midiox.com/myoke.htm

OSC – Open Sound Control
OSC is meant to supersede the MIDI While MIDI requires a MIDI USB device, OSC communicate via a standard home or studio network (TCP/IP, Ethernet) or via the internet.

http://opensoundcontrol.org
http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSound_Control

OSC to MIDI utilities
OCCAM (MAC OS) http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~c.ramakr/illposed/occam.html
OSCulator (MAC OS) http://www.osculator.net/wiki

USB keyboard or Mouse to MIDI or OSC

MouseTrap - MouseTrap lets mouse and keyboard act as general purpose Midi / OSC control hardware.
http://www.humatic.de/htools/MouseTrap.htm

More Links for Muse

http://www.act.co.il
http://createdigitalmusic.com
http://createdigitalmotion.com

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Comparing Eye and Mouse tracking with Computational Attention


Matei Mancas, PhD focus his research at the Faculty of Engineering, Mons, Belgium (FPMs) on Computational Attention.
His research demonstrates several interesting applications that employ computational attention.
The proposed applications are from various areas such as signal processing, data optimization etc'
Matei Mancas Computational Attention page

Matei also developed with two of his students Simon Wallerand and Fre'de'ric Lavis, a mouse-tracking technique he used as a a validation tool for his thesis.
You can participate online in his research by adding your own mouse (that follows your eyes) movements to the research results.
You can upload your images and get the mouse-tracking results on these images. You may also upload entire sets of specific images and than ask for the top-down model to the website administrator.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Exploring human eye behaviour using a model of visual attention

Oyewole Oyekoya and Fred Stentiford presented at the 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2004:

It is natural in a visual search to look at any object that is similar to the target so that it can be recognized and a decision made to end the search. Eye tracking technology offers an intimate and immediate way of interpreting users' behaviors to guide a computer search through large image databases.

This work describes experiments carried out to explore the relationship between gaze behavior and a visual attention model that identifies regions of interest in image data.
Results show that there is a difference in behavior on images that do and do not contain a clear region of interest.

the rest of the article at ieee