So, when I have way too much work to do, I do what any level-headed, self-motivating freelancer would do…usually I start the client clock and pass the time procrastinating by coming up with funny voices, thinking about old girlfriends, and Googling my own name.  I’ve never been disappointed.  And now, I can say, it’s only going to be downhill from here.  I’ve hit the jackpot as far as I am concerned.  Meet Andrew Schneider, auditioning for something called Stonehenge in DC.  The kicker is I used to do this stuff all the time.  Audition on an awkward set, wear red turtlenecks, do funny things with my eyebrows, and get called at the end for time.  I must say though, I thought better about the white Reebok’s when I left my hotel for the theatre the morning of the audition.

I have a dream of contacting all the Andrew Schneider’s that I can and getting us all together and having us do the dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” or something like that.  Afterwards we’d all stand around and talk about it.  Then we’d all get in our Ford Tauruses and drive home, maybe stopping in New Rochelle for some Gas Station Cappucino or the outlet mall for a new pair of stonewashed jeans.

Yeah.

yeah…

Yeesh.  A really short day in the LEMUR studio this evening.  Leif helped me out with note dampening on the guitar bot which helps with things like this:

VIDEO!

More to come tomorrow. The long haul for show prep (which happens on Friday, May 2nd) will be over this weekend. All my performance is belong to you.

Okay day three.  I had a vision in the shower.  That’s usually how it happens.  Change of plans somewhat.  Today I shifted focus from gestural mapping cueing to programming.  The “ModBots” / or the bots that are mainly percussive and tend to hang from the ceiling at LEMURplex / are easy enough to control using simple thresholding detection while wearing the TwitchSet.  But the bots with notes, i.e. the XyloBot and the GtrBot are much harder for me to control with any sort of fine resolution.  The GtrBot, for example, takes MIDI notes of 36-81, which means 45 note resolution.  I had been trying to control notes variations using one axis of the TriAx accelerometers on the TwitchSet.  An accelerometer is not a tilt switch and is a bad substitute for one in this case of trying to get 45 steps of resolution with a 180˚ rotation of my shaky hand.

Besides, I’m not a musician.  I’m not going to become a musician just because I have the pleasure of spending the next two weeks with musical robots.  I’ve decided to focus on the performative aspect of why I’m doing the residency.  Hell yes.  I think I’ve got something going here.  Below is a short clip documenting the partial results of today’s programming.  I didn’t write the song.  And I’m not going to tell you what song it is based on, or who wrote it.  That’s the surprise for the performance.  In progress:

Recently I spent my first significant amount of time at LEMURplex in Brooklyn as part of my April residency in preperation for the Resident show on Friday, May 2nd.  I’m not great with Max/MSP for logic, which seems to be the biggest hurdle for me right now.  That and not possessing the ability to write music are bringing me down.  I will not rest though.  Hopefully I’ll use these obstacles to make more interesting work.  Here’s a video of yesterday’s experiments:

April showers bring May flowers musical robots.  I am fortunate enough to be a ReSiDeNt  at LEMURplex this month in Brooklyn.  LEMUR stands for the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots.  Um….could there be a more perfect residency?  I get to interface with their xylobot, guitarbot, hydrobots, and modbots.  I’m planning on using the Twitchset and Performoshoes (together)as a starting-off point with the bots.  I also plan on doing a lot with the fiddle~ object.  Fellow ITPer and now full time LEMURer, Leif gave me a breif walk-through of the space yesterday.  I’ll be setting up another blog over at LEMUR to document my stuffs.  Here we go…