Week 02

I finished the Drum Tutor brief (html/Word.doc) last night, and Helen Le Voi has just finished reading it. To my surprise she liked it. I was expecting it to be thrown straight out. Though other ideas were rejected:
-The skate park. (not interactive enough)
-Motorised, paint-ball firing go-cart with targets on, which when hit, disengage the engine (Come on, that's Awesome!)
and I didn't dare mention the skinnable USB pluggable alarm clock, because without more than one sentence and a clear concept, any idea is going to sound pretty crap. Well, one out of four ain't bad.
Still, there was no hassle, just 'OK, get started'. Which threw me a little. 'Erm, right then. Where do I start?'. I suppose I'd better try to find Andy Huntington, I hope he's a friendly fellow.
My next steps should also involve reading about kinesthetic memory, or muscle memory and how I can link it to synesthesia. My preliminary research last night didn't reveal any noted links, so I may have to dig up some experts (Jamie Ward and Ramachandran watch your backs). Of course, that was a joke, Jamie Ward and Ramachandran are not, I'm sure, the only experts on synesthesia, and if anyone can help with my research, please email or comment.

I almost got put into a corner with questions about what I had actually been doing this term. Natch I managed to weasel my way out of answering, though I think it's pretty obvious to everyone the response should have been 'very little'. Now I have to develop other Major Project ideas, and write some more briefs. The D&AD comp still lingers over my head like a dark, smelly fart cloud. Like that smell you try to ignore by playing BF2, but in the end it will drive you to seek it out and destroy it at the source. So, I suppose what I'm saying is D&AD is a twin buttocked like entity, which emits clouds of rancid gas...in the form of competitions. Werd.

Week 01

Ok, so it's not really week 1, but it's my week 1 because it seems things are starting to move a bit as far as developing the Drum Tutor goes (I really have to get a better name for it though).
'Graphics' Dave was in again today, which is always good. On being asked on how my projects were coming along, I began to explain my Drum Tutor idea and how I thought it was ok, but it has flaws, and not a killer device, but hopefully that will change and really, I suppose, that's what R+D is all about. So for the purposes of reportage the idea as I explained to Dave is this: or thus: In order to play music properly you should be able to read music, ie understand what the notes on the page mean and play those notes to reproduce the music without ever having previoulsy heard it. In respect to drums, each line in a bar refers to a drum or a cymbal or percussion instrument of some kind. The actual note, whether it's a crochet, a quaver, a semi quaver, or in American english, an eighth, a quarter, a sixteeth, whatever, denotes the time the note is played and the time between the notes. Or something like that. You see, that's where the problem is, I don't get it. I've tried (sort of) but i just don't get it. And why should I? When I, like any person or child (children aren't people, obviously) can so easily reproduce a beat or rhythm having heard it just once. It's seems we have a built in function specifically design just to reproduce rhythm. We do it when we talk, walk, row or any other repetetive motion (oh, yeeeah).
The device I have in mind is, in simple terms, something that you can latch on to the hardware of the drums and cymbals and powered by a midi controller will smack out a beat. The player can then see the music in note form, hear it and play along. Sounds pretty lame? Bit Monkey Drummer? Yeah well it's NOT, SO EFF OFF. But seriously, come back, there are reasons it's not lame. First of all, it will use massively available tabs from the internet. So there will be no end to the amount of music and rudiments to learn. I can imagine this really helping me understand the music, I would use this. and that's why I'm doing this project. Futhermore, hitherto, vis-à-vis, with some of Dave's clever suggestions this could be 'way cool'.
1- Use XML
Yes! What a clever idea. That makes sense, use something that you have learned while you were at ravensbourne. That gives the idea more purpose. Aside that, using XML makes it so much more flexible, so iyt can be used past the concepts and uses that I could even imagine for it. Apparently there's already a project going on for XML music. xMIDI and XMLMusic.
2- Make a program (probably in Perl) that converts ASCII tabs into XML using Regular expressions . Yep. OK, that's sounds very cool, though I did feel my eyebrow raise slightly.
3- Use some kind of XML thing to control the beater. A quick searchizzle on Google revealed RoboML. Excellent!
4- Add voice tags with VoiceXML. Great, so the device can say what notes, beats, styles etc it's playing.
and there are other things that came up. like what about an LCD for the device? USB controller? Website where you can download a fully tagged tab straight to your device via the usb connection?
So, by now you're probably thinking has this person not yet realised that he's way out of his depth, as he has virtually no programming experience or aptitude, no knowledge of MIDI controllers and hasn't even finished writing the brief yet? Well yes, I realised that round about when I asked Dave 'So do you think that this is feasible then?' and he said 'Yeah, well no.'
But that's ok. We decided it's probably better to make the device first, make a simple controller, and then if there's time figure out all the XML stuff. Although the concept may be more important that the actual device, I really want to actually create something, and hopefully, depending on how much help I get from the MA guys, I may get something to work.