NIME is over. The installations all worked out (for the most part) and now it’s time to move on like I said I would. After all the cleaning up of course.
Echology was relatively successful. There was a little disaster in the last 15 minutes of its show, but those who saw it before then became well engaged. People came and played. They tried various combinations of sound directions and tactics. What I noticed the most was how people not only came and played and left, they communicated to eachother over the table. I don’t think that the interface was engaging as a game itself; it’s more that the nature of the piece, the subject matter that everyone can enjoy, the belugas and life, brought out conversation in everyone.
For this I am happy. For now I must sleep. zzzz
Echology finished, setup, shown, torn down
In a New Box. » Blog Archive » from oh god! to woohoo! in 120 minutes said,
[...] I’ll be putting Echology back up for some user testing next month. As a nice kick in my ass to get it working with some improvements, we have demos scheduled for the 27th of this month. That’s cool. What was not very cool was finding out that the atrium environment it was designed for has changed slightly. We wrote the max patches intending for sound to be spatialized with an 8-speaker system. There are now only 6 speakers mounted on the atrium’s overhead truss (see the picture in the link above…the truss is that large thing lowered down so that I have to bend over to work at the table). Things were still possible though. I just had to look at the spatialization patches that Reynald was working on. I decided to do that today. Opening the main patch for editing, this is what I saw: Reynald was right last year - this is absolute spaghetti code. But you know what?! I actually had determination today. I think it’s from all the crosswords I’ve been doing (thanks Tony ; ) ). I went to work using my deduction / colour coordinating skills to the extreme. As a result, tonight I am going home a very very happy woman. I believe, and this was verified with a few trial runs using the new spatializer with my other patches, that the conversion to 6-speakers was successful. Woohoo! OK seriously, now that the task is done, it seems so trivial. But this is a reminder to myself, and possibly inspiration to you, that often the mountains we see are mere molehills. [...]
