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Bricolo mechanical music system hand-on (video)
Nick Yulman has been doing the whole mechanical music thing for sometime. In fact, the first time he came to our attention was at Maker Faire a couple of years back, when he had a cadre of small robotic instruments set up on a table in a quiet corner near the food stands. For ITP's Spring Show, Nick decided to share the love and brought along his Bricolo mechanical music system. Comprised of a number of different modules, Bricolo is meant to simplify the act of incorporating robotics and physical objects into the creation of "electronic" music. The two main pieces are a drum arm, which can be mounted on a mic stand and uses and uses a simple actuator to swing a drum stick, and a platform with a small solenoid that can produce either percussive rhythms or melodic tones. All of the pieces can be easily controlled by any MIDI instrument or sequencer. The small platform that can produce actual musical tones converts notes from any MIDI source into a frequency that the solenoid can vibrate at, creating sound by striking a surface extremely quickly. In the video below you can see as an old hard cover book is turned into a bass synth. Interestingly, by opening and closing the book, varying the weight placed on the platform, you're able to create a filter effect. For the moment the tiny musical motors are largely a proof of concept -- exposed components attached to black or clear acrylic, but the hope is to eventually sell them to curious creators. Our composing skills might not be quite up to Mr. Yulman's lofty standards and we'll never write a bass line as good as I Want You Back. But, we are big fans of noise, and you can make plenty of it with Bricolo. Check out the video after the break to see it in action.
Plinko Poetry hands-on (video)
Don't lie, you love The Price is Right. There's no shame in it. Maybe you don't watch it religiously, but you get a thrill every time you see them break out the Plinko game. Now, what if you could combine that visceral thrill, with the absurdity of magnetic poetry, while juxtaposing the conflicting political perspectives of Fox News and the New York Times. That's exactly what Inessah Selditz and Deqing Sun did with Plinko Poetry, an installation on display at the ITP Spring Show. Operating it is as simple as dropping a red plastic disc, but the tech behind it is decidedly more sophisticated. It starts with a script that harvests headlines from the Twitter accounts of the New York Times and Fox News. Those streams of words then scroll across a screen dotted with yellow pegs. A simple webcam with a polarizing filter tracks not only those pins, but a red disc that you feed through the top of the display. As it tumbles, the words it passes over are selected to create mashups of the days top stories that are sometimes unintentionally hilarious or accidentally beautiful but, more often than not, predictably gibberish. Once the Processing script on the controlling computer constructs the new phrases, they're fired out into the digital ether via the @PlinkoPoetry Twitter account, which you can monitor on the iPad mounted next to the Plinko itself. To see the art in action, head on after the break.
Hacked Kinect taught to work as multitouch interface
We gotta say, the last time we were this excited about hardware hacking For The Greater Good was when people started using the Wiimote for all sorts of awesome projects. Kinect is naturally a lot more complicated, but there's also a lot of potential here, and we can't wait to see what people come up with. Florian Echtler took that open source driver and hooked the Kinect into his own multitouch UI "TISCH" software library (which actually supports the Wiimote as an input already, funny enough). The result is a bit of MS Surface-style multitouch picture shuffling and zooming, but it uses full body tracking instead of touchscreen input, of course. The self-effacing Florian had this to say in the video description: "I thought I'd get the mandatory picture-browsing stuff done so it's out of the way and everybody can focus on more interesting things." You're still a hero in our book, man. Always a hero. Feeling left out on all these Kinect shenanigans because you're rocking a Mac? Well, libfreenect has also now been ported over to OS X by Theo Watson (who sounds unenthused about his accomplishment in the video embedded after the break). Also: once you're done admiring your IR-rendered visage on your shiny Apple-built hardware, scrounge yourself up a working Linux box. All the cool people are doing it.
