Surprisingly sociable 2005 October 18 14:04
Posted by diamond in : Work , add a commentI’ve spent most of the last 2 days doing demos for the csis stand for the ul open days. My demo was a sound synthesizer, using puredata hooked up with a tactex touch pad as an input. I’d written the module for pd to allow this well over a year ago, but we’d never used it. It’s nice to see stuff like that being used after all. Mikael made the sound generators.
I have to say, over the last 1.5ish years i’ve become much more open to the field of electronic music that mikael loves. I’ve spent most of my time at the stand playing with the touch pad, experimenting with the different types of noises you could make. I think my favourite is the one that sounds like whales. It’s surprisingly fun, and i was quite unprepared for the amount of interest that was shown in it. I think last year no-one cared much about what i was demoing, and i was expecting that to be a constant.
I was also surprised at how sociable i was for the duration. I’m not very keen on large groups of people, especially those that i don’t know, and am expected to interact with. I tend to just avoid situations like that in general. The fact that there were many cute (but far too young!) girls in attendance didn’t hurt i guess ,-)
I had one complaint from the kemmy buisness school stand about 30 feet away. A guy dressed in a three-piece suit, looking exactly like your stereotypical buisness… ‘person’ came over and asked was the sound absolutely necessary. I replied that it was the whole point of the demo. I offered to lower the volume a bit, but that didn’t seem to satisfy him. He told me that in buisness this was what was referred to as a ‘negative externality’. I managed to keep a straight face, but i don’t know how.
Had lunch today with mikael, and he asked me how i felt about doing some microcontroller programming for a couple of days, to which i happily replied “wonderful!” -) It’s been ages since i’ve done any really low level programming, and it’s stuff i used to love, so i’m looking forward to getting back into it (though i expect to be very lost for a while). The idea is to program the microcontroller to measure the frequency of a signal on one of it’s pins, so we can take readings from the ~16′ theremins standing in our lab. This, in my book, is cool. -)