Following on from the small experiments on analysing sound and twittering volume levels, we decided to make this >>>> Digit’s Ear. Basically it’s the same idea as before, it hangs around the studio and pick up sound levels. When the volume of the space dramatically changes it tells people about it via twitter. So now anyone wanting to know what is going on in our office can log on to the ear’s twitter feed and see what this giant latex ear is hearing.

After skillfully managing to secure tickets in the first 40 seconds of them becoming available, me, Paul, Liam and Richie made our way to the BFI to checkout the This Happened talks.  Mostly missed the first talk on account of needing to eat ( mmm)  but managed to catch Universal Everything’s V&A generative music sculpture, an amazing virtual 3D model of a heart by Glassworks that made everyone feel guilty they weren’t helping science and humanity in the same way, a printed version of the internet in 2008 by The Really Interesting Group, and my favourite Michael Cross’s purely mechancial contraption “Bridge” that gave people the opportunity to walk on water.  Pretty mind blowing work. Will definatly try and go again.

Here in Digit’s R+D department we’ve been looking at sound and analysing sound input on a micro-controller. One of our areas of research is in autonomous objects (stand alone independant objects that are not attached to a computer) and in exploring this area we had a rough plan to create an object using sound input as a tool for change.  Here’s some of our starting points, first looking at getting the volume and then the direction of the sound.  We used an arduino to analyse and react to the microphone input.

Getting microphone volume on micro-controller from Digit on Vimeo.

Getting direction of sound on micro-controller from Digit on Vimeo.

This was a basic start. Next we wanted to link our sound input to other people and create something that told others what was happening in our environment. We thought we might as well use the most popular social networking platform of the moment and so we started looking at the Twitter API. This is actually very accessible to use and it didnt’ take long to get some results. Our idea was to create an object that floated (not literally ;-P) around our studio and would record sound volumes. Any dramatic changes would be sent back to our twitter feed to give a rough idea about what was happening in our studio. Here’s a prototype…. yes the text is very original…

Twittering the Sound of Digit from Digit on Vimeo.

Over the weekend I visited the Kinetica Art Fair at P3. The fair showed work from Kinetica’s touring collection as well as projects and performances by other interactive artists and design groups including jason bruges studio, chris o’shea and cinimod studio, tinker.it! and body>data>space.
Pics are below.