It’s handmade music night in the studio, Monday the 21st.   7 til 10.  Be there or be a square wave.

So you can test your anti-vuvuzela filter!

Create Digital Music has a tutorial here.

And there’s a VST plug in here.

Of course, if you like the sound, try this.

If you have a vuvuzela, bring it to open studio tomorrow!

(Image  by Flickr user Andrewthecook used under Creative Commons license.

At IA, we spend a lot of time building electronic things, and sometimes neglect the design of physical mechanisms. Often, you want to create a particular kind of motion, but don’t know how to accomplish it.  If your first impulse is to mathematically model the motion, without worrying about such “real world” things like friction, mass, and gravity, you’re doing kinematics.   Remember sliding those little airpucks around in high-school physics, and playing air-hockey with them, instead of doing the lab? That was kinematics.  Fortunately, just like in high school, you can persuade someone else to do the math for you.  One of my favorite introductions to this sort of thing is Cabaret Mechanical Theatre’s book, Cabaret Mechanical Movement. It’s deceptively simple, but if you’ve never played with cams and belts and gears,  you should read this book.  There’s a copy in the IA library!  For more complex mechanisms, you can do no better than the collection of models at Cornell University’s KMODDL.  Warning! If you have lots of important things do do today, you should do them before clicking on the “multimedia” page.  You could spend your whole day watching things like this and this and this.  If you like that sort of thing, you can also get reasonably priced books full of these sorts of mechanisms from Lee Valley.

In the past, it would often take a specialized machine shop to produce some of the complex shapes and gears required for these mechanisms, but now, with affordable rapid prototyping machines on the market, there is a renewed interest in exploring some of these often-forgotten devices.    There are many  examples on the KMODDL site of machines built with  rapid prototyping techniques, together with the files used to produce them.

If you like science, and you like art, you should go.

Details here:

It’s open studio, just like it is every Wednesday, even if we don’t make a clever post here.  Why not try building this circuit?  We’ll help you catch a bat.

(From XKCD, by Randall Munroe, used under Creative Commons License. )

Don’t miss the new show at InterAccess! It’s one of many Images Festival Off-Screen programs!

And IA’s own Alex Snukal will be part of the star-studded line-up for Live Images 3 on Tuesday April 6th at Innis Town Hall. I’d get there early if I were you.