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.

I want to focus on getting each instrument to be as simple as possible in terms of the Isadora set-up and also what the physical interface looks like. In Isadora they need to run using as little computer resources as possible, so everything runs smoothly together. As physical interfaces they need to be easy to understand and access – I feel like it’s important to make them friendly looking, like something anyone can have a go with.

I’ll include images of the Isadora setup, the physical interface and an example of the output, as I talk about the instruments. At this point, I’m looking to see how I can put things together and identify any potential problems. The output of the jams is to video which will be projected in the jamming space. All thoughts and comments (including ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’) warmly welcomed. Here’s the first two instruments:

The Video Mixer

Mixing layers of video is core to my own practice, so first up I wanted to make an instrument to mix videos. This is an instrument to mix 8 videos. The videos are short loops – so the imagery is focused on symbolism, colour, form and texture, rather than narrative, although short spurts of narrative action would be possible. In terms of participatory projects, the idea is to be able to load participants video into the instrument – after I’ve re-encoded it to play nicely in Isadora.

The hardware is an Akai LPD8 with 8 pads and 8 swivel knobs (this controller has useful software to alter the functions of it’s pads and knobs). I’ve added number stickers to the pads and knobs, as I found myself counting to ID controllers when I was trying the interface out. I do think this helps and I also plan to make a printed layout card with space for a thumbnail still printout from each video so the player has a real world visual identifier for each video.

In Isadora I’ve set-up the knobs to control the opacity of each video and the pads to switch a Desaturate filter on and off (fully saturated / 50% desaturated). Once I start to explore using the instruments together, I’ll need to consider where the videos sit layer wise with the other still image and generative elements. Building this has also highlighted that running eight videos at once is resources intensive, as I go forward I’ll need to consider options around reducing the resolution of the videos or reducing the number of videos in play at any one time.

The Image Mixer

An instrument to mix 8 still images. Here I wanted to make something that can enable collage creation, I wanted the images to be able to sit on top of each other, but also alongside each other. Like the videos, participants will be invited to get their images into the instrument for jamming. I make the images 1920 x 1080 px at 150 dpi (to allow for zooming)

The hardware is a Korg NanoKontrol2 with 8 sliders, 8 knobs and three press buttons for each slider/knob. This controller also has some buttons on the left hand panel which I may bring into play as I experiment but I haven’t as yet – I may decide to cover these buttons somehow if they’re not going to be used, to simplify the interface. I’ve numbered each track (or image) for clarity.

In Isadora I’ve set-up the sliders to alter the opacity and the knobs to alter the size of each image (from 30% to 200%). To discourage too much intense focus on exact positioning, I’ve decided to make the position selector a button (‘R’) that selects a random position. The ‘S’ button switches blur on and off and the ‘M’ button switches a 50% Desaturation filter on and off. I’ve made image 1 a base layer image that can’t be zoomed out beyond 100%, so that, as long as this instrument is being used, this image will form the canvas.