When I decided to put together a more structured tool to support our participatory jamming sessions, it was hard to know where to start. I chose Isadora software to build and house the tool but found it difficult to get a starting point – the software opens up so many possibilities. Exciting, but a little bit overwhelming too. Taking the approach of focusing on building individual instruments is certainly helping with this and I’m learning a lot through the process, it’s helping me to clarify what I want the tool to do for me and bringing in new ideas. A good process, then. After creating the image and video instruments to enable the mixing of base layers, I wanted to look at making instruments to allow the placing of shapes and drawn lines over the base layers. I do think that, as I go through this building process, I’ll be altering what I’ve already made in the light of how the new instruments work. All good.
A Colour Keyboard
A keyboard that allows you to play coloured squares and full screen colour filters. The premise is to have a keyboard that responds to the different frequencies of the keys by changing colours on the stage
The MIDI controller is an Akai LPK25 mini 25 key keyboard. I’ve used colour dot stickers to give a visual for the colours assigned to each key and stickers with a raised profile on the first octave white keys to give a visual and tactile prompt (as the two octaves do different things).
In Isadora, a single colour is assigned to each note of the octave. The first octave alters the colour (fixed), size (fixed) and position (random) of the square. Squares fade in/out (from 0 – 70% opacity) with a 5 sec sustain. The second octave alters just the colour of the square/full-screen filter with a fixed opacity of 20% – the extra C on the right toggles between full-screen and a centred fixed-size square for the second octave keys. A single button on left toggles the second octave visuals on and off (I do need to figure-out a way of covering the other left hand buttons as you could stop things from working by shifting the key up and down).
Playing possibilities
The instrument can be used to play laid over the base layers of video/images or over a plain colour base layer
- Use just the first octave to play the squares
- Use the second octave set as a fixed background square that you have colour control of, to add the first octave squares to
- Use the second octave set as a full-screen filter and play the first octave squares over this
- Use the full screen filter alone to play a colour filter over the layers below
A Drawing Tablet
An instrument to give a pen and palette of colours to allow freehand drawing onto the projected image.
The hardware is a Huion Tablet, with wireless pen and 12 single press buttons. This makes a serial connection with Isadora. The software treats the pen movements as a mouse and the buttons as computer keyboard buttons.
In Isadora, drawing happens when pen touches on the tablet only and the mark opacity is set at 30 % so the marks sit on top of the base layers, the mark width is affected by the speed of your drawing the mark (faster = thicker) The buttons give a ten colour palette plus two reset buttons – one to erase the last mark and one to erase all marks. There’s a little white dot to show where you’re about to draw a mark on the projected output – without this it’s hard to imagine where you’re actually about to draw on the screen. The patch does run quite resource intensive once you have lots of marks, so it works best when you make fewer continuous marks rather than loads of little marks.
I do think this instrument brings another way to add visual elements to the jam and I’m pleased with that, I’m not a big drawer myself so it will be interesting to see how others chose to use it during the jam sessions.
