Audio Installation. Software.

So the photographs I posted recently document an installation Tim Duck and I completed in October 2010.

We wanted something interactive that involved sound and we came up with a mix of a classic game along with some trigger pads.

I believe MAX/MSP or SuperCollider would’ve been the best and most flexible choice for the software driving our creation but as our coding skills are not top notch we opted for Ableton Live. It was flexible enough and gave us a starting point.

Our first idea was to reverse engineer a normal PC keyboard to drive Ableton.

I took an old keyboard apart and started playing around with the contacts. We realised that it would still work even with metres of wire extension so that was our first milestone, it will work running metres of cabling.

After a while we began to realise that a keyboard deciphers its commands via a matrix, over 100 input commands on the keyboard are funnelled through the 26 contacts on the little PCB.

I have no background in electronic engineering so we opted for this piece of kit.

http://www.ultimarc.com/ipac1.html

It gives you 56 discrete inputs and simplified things for us.

So that is an overview of what drives the installation, stay tuned and I’ll describe a bit more about the hardware.