Seven years ago I was walking through Soho, for lunch at the New Piccadily, when we heard we'd won the Olympic bid. Seconds later the Red Arrows sped by. I was excited then. I was still excited five years ago. Then, last night I almost exploded. All kicked off by the Red Arrows coming through our back yard. Brilliant.
That. And this. Possibly connected.
A couple of weeks ago we were lucky enough to get a sneak preview of the Web Lab that Tellart have built for Google and the Science Museum. (I think Matt wanted to see some actual kids playing with it, and he was just being nice.)
It wasn't all working when we were there, but the interactive music stuff was - and it's absolutely fantastic. Well worth a visit. They've managed to bring off the feat of building an interactive thing, that has people playing real instruments in the room and people playing real instruments via the web - together - and getting it to sound good, coherent, satisfying and musical. It's pretty impressive. Especially when you consider the challenges of getting video and instruments to sync between the web and the world.
You might remember the lovely Valentine's project they made - playing songs on their little bells via the internet. It's like that, but an orchestra of it.
The whole thing is magnificently made; the opposite of thrown together. Beautifully shaped and painted steel, well considered details. You want to stroke and lick it all. You should go and play.
If you're new here you might not know that I occasionally organised these odd events called 'Interesting'. There's not going to be one this year. Circumstances intervened. I'm not really sure if there'll be another one at all. But, in the meantime, I've built a little archive site so there's something to point at when I talk about it. Like now. It's as complete as I can make it, which is not very. Lots of the Interestings from round the world have fallen off the net and lots of the video we shot in London remains unedited on hard drives. Which, I think, is fine. You had to be there.
But, if you've got stuff you'd like me to include let me know and we'll sort something out. There are probably whole events I've forgotten.
And, to everyone who ever organised one or spoke or helped or came along - thank you, I love you. And I'm still not interested in your feedback.
I've been banging on about sonification long enough it's probably time I actually made something. Here's the first attempt.
In short - it's a little Max programme that takes a feed from a GrowGuard stuck in a plant pot and turns the moisture level in the pot into the ticking and tocking and binging and bonging of an old-fashioned clock.
If that makes no sense, here's a longer explanation.
GrowGuard is a splendid thing, a bit like a botanicalls, which monitors a plant and streams data into a cosm account. It reports on light level, temperature and moisture level and cosm turns these into nice graphs like this:
(As you'll see my GrowGuard is broken right now, new ones are on the way!)
Cosm also lets the data stream out and Guy Evans made a patch that takes the feed from Cosm and lets you play with it in Max.
I wanted something audible that reports the mosture level of the plant (because I can see the light and feel the temperature myself) but in the background, playing to secondary attention, and without too much urgency - it doesn't change that quickly. And I wanted something gradual - triggers and tweets are too abrupt and binary - I wanted to hear it sliding down and up, not being on or off. And, I definitely didn't want music, I wanted sound. There are too many pitfalls around music.
So, I've made it tick and tock like an old-fashioned clock and bing and bong on the hour. The tick and the bing always play at the same pitch but the tock and the bong play at dfferent pitches representing the current relationship between the cosm feed and a target number you set for it. So the relationship between tick and tock and bing and bong tells you the wetness or dryness of the soil. So, at any time you can listen for the tick/tock and tell what's going on, and, every hour, you get a slightly more intrusive alert. Slightly. That's the idea anyway.
If you'd like to try it out, you'll need Max Runtime installed, which is free from here (there's a link at the top right of the page). Then you can download the patch (it's called tickosm.mxf) It probably only works on a Mac though. Then you need something feeding data out of cosm - you can set up a twitter account to do that if you've got nothing else. Then you just stick the relevant feed/API details in the boxes at the bottom.
Notes
This is the first bit of software I've ever made so it probably won't work. Guy's original patch contains a little bit of javascript I'm powerless to understand, but, which I imagine, might let this work with other sources of data. And, when I work out how, I'll stick the original patch on GitHub so if anyone fancies improving it, they can.
The patch is a thing Max calls a 'collective' - I think that means it'll only work on a Mac. I've also tried to make it into an 'application' which should, I believe, be cross-platform. But I couldn't get that to work. I'll keep trying.
I never know how to start these things.
This is a blog post about me, and what I'm doing, just because it seems an efficient way to let people know. Not because I really expect most of you to care.
I'm no longer working for R/GA. I haven't been there, really, since Christmas. They were extraordinarily nice and smart people. Jim, particularly, was a proper gent, and we did some fun things, but it was just bad timing. Various personal circumstances meant I didn't really give it a proper shot. (Those circumstances are, better now, in case you're worrying.)
I'm glad though that we managed to do the Make Day, that was good. And I did a bit of strategic hoo-hah on Getty Images which, hopefully, paved the way a little for the rethinking of the watermark, which was very smart and was mostly nothing to do with me.
I left with the intention of having more time at home and doing more freelancing, but almost instantly got drawn into working for the Government Digital Service - and this turns out to be thoroughly rewarding and brilliant. I started alongside Ben, have been doing some strategic gubbins and, as a welcome bonus, some writing. The most visible thing so far, was probably the Design Principles project - writing that, with a bunch of very smart designers, was incredibly satisfying.
Anyway, I'm hoping to be here for a while. It's good people, meaningful work, interesting problems, stuff I don't know how to do. It's fantastic.
There probably are less helpful ways to say 'wifi' but this is right up there.
