Legoleptic
Idea and introduction
In a world of safety-instructions we need to get origins of danger back in our life.
You can't start early enough.
For this reason our creative art project developed a future toy,
that combines the unique risk of stimulus satiation with that classic hazard of swallowable small parts.
The user interface is a box filled with multi-colored legos. by moving the legos the user can change the music and video produced by the program. Different colors represent different instruments. The red blocks manipulate diffenerent aspects of a fm synth, like the waveform the LFOs and frequencies. The yellow, blue and black ones (which are disabled by default) trigger preset wave-samples. The program detects the outer limits of the fields marked by same-colored blocks. The vertical center of each box is interpreted as pitch, while the horizontal length time-stretches the sample. The detected sequence is perpetually looped and and accompanied by a drum-sample, which changes perpetualy. All actions of the user will also be visualized on the screen, where colored boxes and the synthesized waveform are shown. If there is no action for a longer period the volume is lowered so that the people working at the museum keep their sanity. Parts of the visualization and the sounds are random so that even with a static lego-field the display stays interesting.
Example
How this all works out in the real world:
The user is lured toward the interactiv piece of art by the fancy visualizations. Of course when he sees the lego he will immediately want to play with it, but once he touches a stone the volume is turned up (to the max) and the visuals change according to the movement of the stones. Step by step he figures out how to control the sound and he will be able to create music. With the help of the visual feedback the user will be able to quickly grasp the concept of the program.
A high-level list of tasks we accomplished for our project
- Get the right coordinates of the melody and sample blocks
- Visualization as described above
- Random background beat
Specific problems/challenges
- Get the right coordinates of the melody and sample blocks at different light ratios
- Synchronize melody, samples, beat and visualization
Possibilities for future work
- Bigger/better user interface
- Different colored lego to control the speed
- Using a grid for more accuracy
- More samples
List of references
- Testing beats: Fruity Loops
- Merzbow
Links to our Max/MSP patches
- Main: legoleptic.zip
Link to our original project description
Group members
Björn Ganslandt: bganslan@gmx.net.
Daniel Grams: moeglich14@gmx.de.
Johannes Schnettker: johannes@sights.de.
Nils Vehreschild: achmann@gmx.de.