The exhibition will be on display from today until Monday afternoon so be sure to pop by and have a go at making some interesting sounds from reclaimed and remixed toys.

You can read more about the event here on the Barbican’s website.

The event was full of other activities like photography, stop frame animation and sound design, I ended the day with a performance and Q&A and good fun was had by all.

You can find out more details of the event and BBC Blast in general here.

I was very fortunate to meet and chat with most of the speakers Chris Serle (The Computer Show) , Sophie Wilson (ARM processor and Acorn Computers) , Dylan Smith (the Tweeting spectrum) I even asked some questions during the Q&A’s for both Sophie Wilson and O.M.D. who gave an amazing Q&A and performance of some new songs and classics. The volunteers at the museum also took to giving presentations at the museum Peter Onion on the Elliott 803, Tony Frazer on the Witch, Delwyn Holyroyd on mainframes of the 1970s, Tony Sale on Colossus and our youngest volunteer Adam Bradley on the Cray series computers which the crowd loved.

I also gave two performances in the mansion which were good fun because of the small audience size, people could ask questions during, for the chip tune performance I even took them through the code for the visuals. The second show on Sunday was was a re-showing of Obsolete? and a Q&A which I am beginning to like doing more and more. For the rest of the time I was directing people round the museum and talking to exhibitors.

All in all it was a great weekend and good fun was had by all, I even picked up a second BBC Micro.

You can hear BBC’s Broadcasting House’s report on it here around 54 minutes in to the programs, also report on the event at the BBC Technology website here.

Facebook event page for my workshop here and main BBC Blast Bury St. Edmunds page here.

Image reproduced with permission see footer.

Well I can honestly say I feel that the opening night of “Childhood Remixed” was a success, we had loads of visitors and lots of fun. For many visitors it was there first experience with either circuit bending / automation or chip tune and many found it an enjoyable one. Children of all ages from 8 to 80 were happy at play on the modified toys to make sounds. Both the Mayor and Dr. Michael Doherty gave speeches about my work and said nice things about me too, so all in all it was a good night. Sincere amount of thanks to James Noble and Julia Devonshire for all of their continued help and support during the install week, I couldn’t have done it without them.

Click on one of the photos to see more on my Flickr page.

Childrens’ toys are often seen as transitional objects that let the child gain mastery of the world around them. Paradoxically “Childhood Remixed” seeks to re-purpose the toys of Pixelh8’s childhood with the skills and understanding of the world he has as an adult. By rewiring, re-purposing and re-using them he will essentially be remixing his own childhood to form an orchestra of automated toys and interactive instruments.

Scouring the local car boot sales, charity shops and in some cases rubbish bins, Pixelh8 was able to reclaim some of the toys that informed him musically and creatively as a child, by re-working them with new acquired skills it will in turn create a learning curve that folds back on itself.

Childhood Remixed was commissioned by Ipswich Borough Council & Turnstone Arts Grants sponsor Ip-art Award 2007- 2010 and will be on display in Town Hall Galleries from May 29th to July 12th as part of the Ip-art festival.

The game will be all edited and back to them in a week for them to play on in school and at home. Next up tonight “An Evening With Pixelh8” all sold out!!!

I also set a few traps along the way for them to figure out for themselves and they were successful in solving the problem. Again this is just another piece of the overall project, and will later be merged with work from other sessions.

Cleverly they also worked out how to load other graphics and experimented with them too.

To get the below example to work

1) Load up processing and save immediately this will create a folder, example “MazeGame”

2) Within that folder create another folder called “data” so MazeGame\Data

3) Within that folder put a graphic called “good.png” 40X40 pixels.

4) Run it

//MazeGame
//Copyright Room 1 Studios 2009
//Matthew C. Applegate – Pixelh8

int goodx, goody;
PImage hero;

void setup(){
background(0);
size(600, 400); // 15 X 10
hero = loadImage(“good.png“);
}

void draw (){
background(0);
updatescreen();
}

void updatescreen (){
image(hero, goodx*40, goody*40);
}

void keyReleased() {
if (key == CODED) {
if (keyCode == UP)    {goody=goody-1;}
if (keyCode == DOWN)  {goody=goody+1;}
if (keyCode == LEFT)  {goodx=goodx-1;}
if (keyCode == RIGHT) {goodx=goodx+1;}
}
}

I simply talked them through the interface, how the variable, set-up, and draw areas of Processing work with eachother. The full example is below, but it’s important to note we did it in stages, purposely missing things out to cause “problems” which we set about solving.

Now bearing in mind these were 13-14 year old kids who inhabit a full on multimedia world and computers are pretty much part of their everday life, it was still nice to know that having the ability and being empowered to do even the most basic tasks in Processing (like draw a box on the screen), was still really enjoyable. It was like watching lights flicker on as I said to “experiment” with the different values in the code, but they worked it all out very quickly.

Processing was chosen for several reasons for this project.

1) It’s free and runs and outputs to most operating systems including a webpage.

2) There is also Mobile Processing which means lessons learnt in this environment can be moved to mobile phones and other mobile devices.

3) There is also Arduino which is based on Processing for controlling external devices like motors, solenoids, lights & robotics.

So in the space of an hour they learnt about integers, variables, loops, how to output to the debugging console and to load a font and display all the information to a screen. Next week we will show them how to load a graphic and move it around the screen, no prizes for guessing where we are heading. And yes I am aware all this does is count down from 300 and keeps going, thats because this small example forms part of a much larger project.

This work forms part of my Masters Degree and soon my PhD and will all be written up shortly for others to read in it’s entirety. I am also very glad that several other schools have now taken up my offer to run this 8 week after school course for their students.

Below is the code, but to get it to work, you will.

1) Start processing, and save immediately, call it whatever you want, you do this so it will create a folder.

2) Create a font in the drop down tools menu, size 24, type Arial MT, that way the code will find it and load it correctly. From the folder you just created by saving.

//Timer
//Copyright Room 1 Studios 2009
//Matthew C. Applegate – Pixelh8

int counter;
PFont fontA;

void setup(){
counter = 300;
size(300,300);
fontA = loadFont(“ArialMT-24.vlw”);
textAlign(CENTER);
textFont(fontA, 24);

}

void draw(){
background(0);
counter=counter-1;
delay(100);
println(counter);
text(counter,150,150);
}

Today was different to the other lessons, we started by looking at organic sounds, sounds with no electronic circuits. I had asked the students last week to bring in something metal, something all in one piece like a spoon or a fork, we simply attached the item to a piece of string and held each end of the string to our ears. The sounds is incerdibly different as it allows the energy in the lower frequencies to make it to our ears. Hanging the items from a microphone stand and using a Cducer Contact Mic borrowed from friend, colleague and composer Mike Challis, it allowed an even fuller sound to be heard in the headphones. We even used a whammy bar that was in the studio and used that as the instrument itself.

After this we had a look at timbre, which the students had already learnt about, but had never seen the concepts behind it. So using Sygyt’s Overtone Analyzer, I played several different sounds through it, I explained how we could alter a sound of a piano to sound like a guitar by making several cahnges to it’s properies. The image above is of the sounds produced by a Nintendo DS altering the the wave duty at 12.5%, 25%, 36.5%, 50% etc.

Below are some sounds recorded from spoons first with a normal SM58 type clone and then with the Cducer Contact Mic.

SpoonSounds