Hey peeps,

I'm building a reactable (just google it if you don't know what it is) and I'm looking into ways of lighting the inside of the box, but also have it look cool. At the moment I'm thinking of something like Cathode tubes or LED's.

I'm wondering if anyone knows where I could get them from, either in Brissy, or cheaply online.

I've got an old pc working to run as the brains of the instrument, and I'll be building the wooden enclosure this weekend, as long as work pays me. It should be awesome once it's done.

Zygurt

EDIT: Another option is those usb powered LED lights that plug into a usb port like this.

And if I had unlimited money, one of these would be awesome as well.

you should get a blacklight or something, that would be pretty cool

Yes it needs to be backlit so that the camera can see the markers that I put on the table, hence my question as to where to buy lighting stuffs.

LightsRus

whatever that thing is...it looks like a waste of cash lol, cool but a waste of cash. Whats wrong with just saving your cash and buying Reason 4/FL Studio/Kontrol/Kore 2/Ableton ect ect? There is an aussie product that is sort of similar but uses translucent buttons that can have its imprint images changed electronically, very cool peice of equipment without looking like theme park equipment.

Good luck to your build though, LED's are the right choice as power wise and illumination are good

sorry dude but Im not sure if its the mic or whatever but it's pretty hard to listen to, hurts the ears with all the weird sounds. Interesting use of technology.

Dessicrater wrote:

sorry dude but Im not sure if its the mic or whatever but it's pretty hard to listen to, hurts the ears with all the weird sounds. Interesting use of technology.

Haha its a combination of the 2 lol. The idea behind it was to compose with sound rather than instruments, so I think I hit that nail on the head. My performance sounds better because it was recorded properly rather than using the mic on the dodgy shaky cam.

This is kind of what I was aiming for, or at least to have something similar. unfortunately by symbols don't interact.

so as far as I can tell there is no way for you to tell what is interacting with what, you've got to guess. A starting point might be for you to add the 'source' point. A dot like what they have on thier system which is where all sounds start. Also you need to have a projector and something that can read the IR and tell the computer where to project objects around the symbol. I guess you've got the IR set up but no projector system.

At the moment you are getting more like atmospheric sounds with yours than anything you could make music with...unless you invent a new genre

I've written symbols on top of the mirrors. like ~ for a sine tone and a square wave for a square wave. I should take a photo next time I'm in at uni of all the symbols on the tangibles (objects).

The other thing was that I wanted it to be something that you experiment with and can make sound right away.

The next one will be more like Clerk's box with a screen and I'm still wondering if I'll use objects again. I was going to use IR, but I couldn't get it bright enough. So I'm using a single lightbulb instead.

Haha make music lol. Its interesting how studying a music degree changes what you percieve as music. For me, music is when a human has deliberately created or manipulated sound, with the purpose of making music or organising sound.

Something that I'll be writing about in my final submission is that by itself (just a recording of the sound) the device fails miserably. It works best when you're actually using it and making sounds. If I were to create "music" (pop/alternative etc) I would have to use it as a single instrument amongst others.

Hopefully a friend who also made one puts a video of his up so I can link you guys to it.

well the only thing is, if you look at reactable, it can have symbols for drum loops and such so you can make a beat, if you can do that too it would be good, I wouldnt say it failed miserably, you should be proud you did something that others wouldn't have had a go at.

Reactable is a interactive mixer with built in synthesizer and sound loop playback, yours could be too I guess but how far do you want to take it.

Dessicrater wrote:

well the only thing is, if you look at reactable, it can have symbols for drum loops and such so you can make a beat, if you can do that too it would be good, I wouldnt say it failed miserably, you should be proud you did something that others wouldn't have had a go at.

These are the objects that I was moving around on the surface. So they do have symbols on them denoting what each of them do, it would be impossible to use if they didn't.

It is possible to use only loops and have them sync to each other, but I chose not to do that, for the primary reason that a friend of mine was building 2 of them and triggering sounds with them. So I wanted mine to be different to his. It was also easier to have it generate what could be described as primatives or the basic building blocks of electronic sound. In the future I'm looking at incorporating a display/visual feedback, as well as interation based on proximity and a sync'd audio system. But for 11 weeks what I've got isn't bad. Now to edit my 5000 word paper on it.

5000 word...interesting!

I understand some of the symbols but whats the 2nd 3rd and 4th vertical lines of symbols mean?

another cool idea would be to invent a touch screen interactive which you can DRAW with your fingers the symbols and such on your display, once drawn you can then make them a permanent movable object on the screen, move them around, adjust properties by sizings or attaching other symbols....man that would look cool.

Ok, I find that quite interesting, but I kind of knew that would be the case. When I did the final sound installation on teh night of the performance I had to cut back which symbols I let people use. 1A and 1B are 2 parts of a granular synthesizer, and the same with 2A and 2B.

I wanted to create the device so that anyone could use it straight away, but also make it so tha someone who wants to put more time into learning it has some harder symbols to learn to use.

The middle top is drums (obviously), and the 3 below it are what I call 6-notes. These symbols have the rotation split into 6 different areas to give something tonal for the player to use, rather than just continous variables.

The 4th column is 3 sample symbols. So you put them on the screen and they playback a sample that has been pre-chosen. At the moment, the first 1 is a timing symbol so that I knew how long the performance had gone for, and the other 2 are just random samples. Named 16 and 17 so that any sample that is named 16.wav or 17.wav can be used. The reason for using 16 and 17 is that they are the ID's of the symbols. The bottom one in that column is a awtooth wave.

Top right is a sqaure wave, but instead of going from low to high and then jumping back to the low pitch when crossing the 0/360 degrees, it has the same frequency at the 0/360 degrees and another pitch at 180 degrees.

And yes that would be awesome. The guys that made the original reactable have it so that you can draw what waveform you want with your finger and change the generator to that sound. Creating the gesture library would be the tricky part.

Here is my installations and performance with the Reactable.



I've also uploaded a software version which can be found here. You'll also need to download Pure Data which is the program that I've used to make sound. It can be found here.