| SoundShell :: weekly :: week#11 ::1 ::2 ::3 |
| Also, I did a major re-design of my instrument, given the feedback form the performance. I solidified the shell by caulking the layers, and made it more bottom-heavy by making holes in it and filling in caulk. I also soldered an ethernet jack onto the back, so that no circuits or electronics are inside the shell itself, only sensors powered through a 25-ft cat-5 cable. So, you can now actually hit the shell. Towards that end, I attached 4 magnetic sensors to the front of the shell at different layers. When you hit them directly with the mallet (which now has magnets inside it), they clear a pair of stereo buffers in the instrument. Another addition is the action of hitting the front of the shell, where the infrared sensor is. That causes the soundshell to toggle its live sampling on/off. To reinforce this behavior, I tweaked some other features - when you bring the mallet close to the sensor, it raises the total volume of the shell's sounds by a much higher margin, and you don't need to bring it as close as before to get that "fracturing" sound (caused by re-sizing all the buffers at once). |
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