*miserychick is actually happy

Those reading my tweets and FB status will notice my couple of trips to NYC this past month since I’ve been back from Thailand. While it sounds very world-traveler of me, we were actually working. Quite hard too, but as is our usual style, it’s pretty complicated to explain what we’re doing.

“Are you visiting?  Here for the bday celebration?”  
“No, we’re working on a project”  
“What project?”
“well… on this… thing”

I dunno, you try to describe it:

It’s a big interactive piece that will let children play with the light and the objects to make music.  You’d call it a musical instrument, except the pieces themselves don’t make music.  The computer does.  So there’s a bunch of touch sensors and rotary encoders working together to send the data to the computer.  Then there’s this software running on it to coordinate the sound output with the data input.  capice?

We were working on it at AV&C in New York.  Jeff did the detail design of the thing, my husband (I actually kind of like saying that now, it makes me feel super mature, like a lady type) designed the circuits and the controllers that communicate with the ‘puter.  All the lights are individually addressable RGB LEDs.  The communication is over ethernet, using OSC protocol.  The circuit boards were partly manufactured and partly soldered by hand (yes, by hand), they were then individually wired, unwired, rewired, unwired, rewired again until we got it all working.  Oh my lord, you don’t even know how much work is that much work.

While our part is almost done, the whole piece is only half finished.  Now the sound part needs to be programmed (the music is composed by Joshua Fried) once it is finalized, the unit will be shipped to a brand new museum somewhere in the Northeast and kids will get to slap their hands all over the thing.  

Here’s the set on flickr.

Posted on Monday, 23 February 2009 at 16:05 UTC