Back in November I was asked to be one of the “cutting edge” developers at the Power of Minds Hack with Honda, organised by Rewired State, in one word it was” excellent”.
I was fortunate to team up with Emily Christy, Sym Roe and Kevin Fong for a project called Bike Alert, on the day it was voted best in design and now thanks to the readers vote it has received an additional £2000 to be developed further.
You can see the full article on the Guardian website which explain the the whole project here.
I am very excited about the win, I however am having to bow out of the project due to teaching and studying committments, I wish them well and I hope you will check out their work and progress. It is a great project and I hope it will save lives.
I always like to have a plan, in fact most of my 2012 is already planned out and I have some cool things coming up.
A lot of you may have noticed I have moved away from being “Pixelh8″, I still am “Pixelh8″ I am just more interested in promoting, facilitating and helping others be creative, I have always done this, it is just my main focus now. Whether it be making or performing music, designing or programming games or creating stop frame animation. 2012 is going to be about helping others create. There are two reasons for this;
1) I have had five years of fun, making and promoting myself as Pixelh8 it would be nice to now help others.
2) I am starting my PhD in “Educational Music Technology” all my research will be focused on helping to get others involved in music performance and creation.
There are already some great events I am booked for in 2012, Games Britania a game making festival in Rotherham which is building year on year, HESFES home educating festival where i’ll be designing games in a field, BACON a two day technology conference, British Museum workshops, St. Albans game design week, Young Rewired State 2012 and working with IP1 and The Mix to deliver so unique music making workshops. Don’t panic if I have missed anything. The full list albeit amazing is quite long indeed.
This doesn’t include the two patents, several conferences, maybe another published paper, being in a book about music, making all of my existing iPhone Apps HD for the iPad, “OCARBOT 2″ and “Cross-side” for iPhone, helping my ex-degree students publish some XBOX 360 games, jumping out an airplane and sending something else into space. 2012 will be busy.
Of course this is just the “plan” things will change. “OCARBOT EDU” has been slightly delayed to fix a few things here and there; try and trim the 134MB distribution size, allow myself a chance to recharge my batteries and to play on some new games and software over christmas.
Hopefully I’ll bump in to you in 2012 either in real life or on twitter, @pixelh8. Either way I hope 2011 was good for you and that 2012 will be even better. If you need me for anything just drop me a line.
I was fortunate to be asked to give two talks to at BT, Adastral Park to ICT teachers and technicians, the talk mainly focussed on my previous work and looked at how “OCARBOT” was developped for education.
They were both great groups, both passionate about using tech in exciting ways and I look forward to working closely with some of them in their schools on new projects.
“OCARBOT” is a puzzle platformer with over five gameplay zones spread over fifty levels and features an original chip tune soundtrack. The app is available at the Apple App store here. It’s not free as the funds from the sale of the game will help pay my student fees for my PhD into researching music and technology for teaching children music.
The game itself took three months from beginning to end and will actually be used as a teaching tool to teach children about videogames. I have documented the entire process from beginning to end for a series of lectures and you can you can read more about the development of the game here.
MicroSynth for the Apple iPhone® and Android is exactly that, a tiny synth based on a wonderful the BBC Micro Computer which is now on the verge of being 30 years old! All of the sounds you hear are actual samples taken from one of my real Micros and all of the sounds were also programmed by me. I hope you you enjoy making music with this MicroSynth.
The App is avaiolable now from the Apple app store here, and from Android Market here you can also download all of the sounds that are included in the App for use in your own music or whatever here. BBCMICROSOUNDS ZIP FILE (6.13 MB) release under Creative Commons License
Closer to September 30th, 2011 the BBC Micros 30th Birthday I will be releasing my archive of several hundred almost a thousand retro sounds made with my BBC Micro free for you to use.
“6X9″ or “6 by 9″ for the Apple iPhone® is a simple logic based puzzle game. You simply use the “Directional Blocks” to move “You” to the “Exit”, it’s that simple, right? The Free “Lite” version features 20 of the 100+ levels available in the “Full” version and is available here. The “Full” version also includes “Progress Save”, loads more music and some surprises. The “Full” version will obviously follow the release of the Lite version in about two weeks.
The whole game came about by simply reusing graphics from a piece of educational software that I had made to teach kids music. I simply thought “what if I did this, and this” and shazamm we have an entirely new puzzle game to infuriate players featuring a chip tune soundtrack by yours truly. I am very excited by this, the first game release from Room 1 Studios.
• The gig is on April 27th at Norwich Arts Centre, St Benedict’s Street, Norwich. Playing are Smoke Fairies, James Broad of Silver Sun and pixelh8. • Tickets are a MINIMUM DONATION of £5, but please, if you can afford it, consider contributing more. You can choose how much to pay when you book tickets, whether it’s over the phone or via the online booking system, or in person at the venue.
Amid all the chaos I thought the only thing I could do to help was to put together a complation of chip music help raise donations and awareness for the people of Japan in their difficult time. If it wasn’t for the hard working people of Japan there would be none of this great chip tune music in the first place.
The compilation is available now! In exchange we simply ask you to donate or do something positive for Japan. We will not be collecting any money ourselves, we are using First Giving to help collect money on behalf of the Red Cross to aid in the Tsunami relief campaign here.
Current Artists include, over 100 in total
Pixelh8 | Jellyfish Lunchbox | Facundo | Bit_Rat | bit mummy | Abortifacient | little-scale and Poppi Doser | b4kn | bit face | Bear & Walrus | Seventh Gear | Fury in the Fire | receptors | crashfaster | ondoh | _node | Glomag | Andrew Kilpatrick | Neurofllip | aircrash alive | 8 Bit Weapon | PANDAstar | poisoncut | Diamonds & Dynamite | Comptroller | Palace Cat | Lucy Lefty | Space Town Savior | Starbuck | Nathan Meunier | Da Pantz | Jonny Nero Action Hero | Josh Whelchel | 8bit bandit and Zane | Droid-On and Mika Y | MOUTHLESS | dixan/mfx^sk^sfc | ne7 | Katon (feat. Cafechan) | Br1ght Pr1mate | Saskrotch | Joseph K | Numbers in Love | jefftheworld | Samwave | My Brother Daniel | BFunk20xx | TEMPHUiBIS | Danimal Cannon | Glowing Stars | DJ Blackmarker | gwEm and Counter Reset | Neurobit | Ovenrake | lazerbeat | scrumtoe | easyname | Zebra | Holy Konni | Jonas The Plugexpert | Euan Lynn | Obsolète Broadcast Système | Bud Melvin | Byzanite | Je deviens dj en 3 jours | E U C A R Y O T E | The Attic Bits | Khades | The MM Project | DYLANBROCHILL | Feryl | MattyBoJangles | Louis G. | Hyperwave | NEIGE | leeni | ComputeHer | Prizmatic Spray | Steve | Forbidden Colour | Neil Voss | Rainbow Jump Orchestra! | Kris Keyser and AdamGetsAwesome | Of Japan | Exilefaker | Psifork | Chetreo | Wizwars | Matecha | 8GB | Peter Swimm | Nick Maynard | taiiga | Sabrepulse | Jellica | Untested Methods | µB | Creutzfeldt Jacky | Stu | Supercommuter | Supersole | tempsoundsolutions | Shrimps | Pulselooper | Falling For A Square | Subway Sonicbeat | Mystic Hero | Beverage | Zonic | Cityscape, Go! | Battle Lava | Inverse Phase | Adelina Turcu – Sorin Tudor (piano) | The Munitionettes | Active Knowledge | Nekoya | Mark Denardo f/ Bit Shifter
V2 is already available for download and features 90 tracks!!!
I have also asked @TCTD (on Twitter) to help organise it, we want any and all chip tuners involved the more the better. If you can please help spread the word. You can follow me @pixelh8 and @TCTD on twitter for updates. If your an artists submit tracks to @TCTD on Twitter!!! ASAP!
We had one of our final foley recording sessions today, following on from that I took them through the basics of sound editing and showing them a few tricks I have learned over the years. Today we recorded a lot of vegtables, cabbages for alien pods opening, celery for bones snapping.
Listen to the “FoleyMedley” Mp3 below for some extacts of the nearly hundred sounds in all made and recording by the students on the video game design course at University Campus Suffolk. Mp3 include ship taking off, machine humming, door opening closing, footsteps, lasers and more.
I was asked to give a set of three lectures at Anglia Ruskin by a colleague Steven Harris who has managed to put together a very impressive video game design and programming course. The three lectures look at sound and music in video games and films, looking at several game trailers and clips from cartoons we were able to discuss some of the more common elements and assess the intended effect on the viewer.
Good fun was had by all and I can tell they are thinking about it as I am receiving emails about the talk already.
Internationally renowned chip tune musician, teacher, designer and published author Pixelh8 / Matthew C. Applegate makes his music from reprogramming some of the oldest and rarest vintage computer systems in the world.
Parallel to his involvement in music performance, Pixelh8 encourages creative computing in schools and workshops across the United Kingdom and is a PhD research Degree student researching "Educational Music Technology".
I was fortunate to team up with Emily Christy, Sym Roe and Kevin Fong for a project called Bike Alert, on the day it was voted best in design and now thanks to the readers vote it has received an additional £2000 to be developed further.
