Fodder for growth

Papert had such a bold memory of his fascination with gears. He saw how this experience drove him to explore other areas and relate new challenges to in terms that he could understand. Perhaps more importantly he recognized this "falling in love" as something intangible that spurred future learning and experimentation. Papert recognized that the fact that this event had anything to do with gears was of minor importance, instead he knew that the value was in developing a deep emotional attachment with...anything at all!

I think my earliest memories might go back to when I was 3-4 years old, nothing before that. As I was searching for my version of "gears" I looked at where I am now and what events might have been pivotal to getting me here.

There is a piece of music that has been a part of my life for quite some time. Specifically the opening melody to Mussorgsy's "Pictures at an Exhibition". I have really liked the entire work, listening to the orchestral arrangement by Ravel and watching 10 different interpretations of the piece played by artists performing at the Van Cliburn Piano Competition. I've played movements on the piano myself, and even performed the 1st movement playing MIDI trumpet with a synthesizer ensemble. This piece has been a revolving fixture in my musical life for more than two decades. But I was not in a musical setting when I first heard it....

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/248724398


I first heard the piece when I was playing a computer game, I didn't know what the piece was... I just knew I liked it.

I struggled a little bit with programing this game. I tried looking for other scratch programs that did what I wanted mine to do but I couldn't find any that I could use.
One that came close was this...


I was looking for a way to have the correct melody trigger the final screen... but I couldn't find a way. It turned into a bit of a black hole for time. I would start working after dinner and then the next thing I knew it was edging in on midnight.... oh dear.

I'm sure it will become less tedious and more efficient that more I work with the platform, but it all still seems really thick to move through.

Turtle Power!

Although I encounter devices running computer code every day in the music classroom, I usually do not stop to think about how a device does what it does. I have thought from time to time that it would be nice if I had an app that could do ______. But alas, my knowledge writing code and programing is limited to merely knowing about it or knowing that such a thing exists. I found it sort of funny that I was one of only a few people that had to download the "Java development kit" in order to get the Turtle Art application to run... I assumed it was because other people have had to download it previously for other programing projects, hah!

I found the application easy to use after only a few minutes of tutorial and then I was enjoying the sandbox nature of the program.

Drawing squares has never been so rewarding!

After playing around some more I felt like I had enough of a tenuous grasp on things to try and draw something inspired by a piece of art. 

I think I was equal parts inspired by my doodling to find a piece of art that reminded me as I was inspired to create and modify my program to emulate the artwork. 

The two methods sort of built upon each other and what seemed like a few minutes later(in reality a little more than an hour) I created an interpretation of this field of flowers!

ta-da!

I started writing the program to create a flower shape and then set the xy coordinates to random. I decided a smaller flower would create some balance and variety in the drawing so I wrote that in the code as well as a random color selector. I experimented with the "if-then" tabs and got the flowers to be drawn as 12-sided polygons if they were assigned a y-value greater than 0. I included two sizes to polygons in each of the two strands of shape producing code(one for medium and one for small. After some tweaking with the color palette a little bit I ended up with the result above. It's not a nuanced as the painting, but I think keeps in the spirit of the original work!

My next piece was inspired not by a piece of visual art but by a piece of music by Steve Reich. The piece is the 1st movement from his larger work titled Electric Counterpoint. 

The piece is minimalist and really drives home slight changes of periods time. The timbres, ryhthms 

and melodies are very angular which inspired me to choose the diamond as the theme that would repeat and change over time. 

I started writing the code to do a single diamond, then a row, then a second row and then the whole screen. I experimented with different kinds of repeating... offset, bigger, smaller, and then decided on the slowly evolving filling in of the interlocking diamonds. Like the piece before I played around with the color selector but this time I wanted more order and predictability so I used an equation to that(somehow) ended up filling in the diamonds with a uniform color each time the turtle added on. While the finished product is relevant to the inspiration, I think the full experience is running the code while the piece plays and watching the turtle draw to the music!

The Turtle's Process:

The .png files that include the code.

Making an interactive Thingamajig

Step one: Overthink Everything

Days prior to actually putting anything together I was wracking my brain to think of some way to combine these things in such a way that would be, in a word, extraordinary. I may have done myself a disservice by not digging into Rob Faludi's webpage with the very useful phrase, "Don't over-think it". Well, it was a little late in the game to un-over-think things but I did just that, I stopped by the dollar store and grocery store to pick up some "synthetic" feathers(see description/reasoning in the picture) and some lentils... Somehow I would cook up something for this project.

The "feathers" are substituted with party blowers because the real feathers I found on the ground were from pigeons, and I'm just not sure I'm at a point in my life where I feel like I should be collecting pigeon feathers off the street in Astoria.

I had this idea to combine the cup and lentils with some kind of movement to make a sound. My inclination was to make a shaker kind of percussion instrument but I would experiment with the other movements to see if anything surprised me. 

While many of the "inputs" to the lentil-cup did little except make me glad there wasn't a mirror or anybody watching me, dancing elicited the most interactive result. So, dancing lentil-cup it is. 

There was more to be done, though. I had spent all this time trying to find a not-gross feather on the ground in NY and settled for some feather-esque things and you'd better believe that I was going to find a way to use them. 

While I was walking around (I do a lot of walking, it has both a brainstorming and mind-cleansing effect) I had the idea to try and combine the feathers and breath. I had imagined the feathers flying up and around under the power of me blowing on them; that was the rough idea, not I had to figure out a way to do it. Naturally, the first step was to go to the kitchen and get the bread knife.

Bread knife...birds eat bread...birds have feathers...this is a feather replacement...RATIONAL CONNECTION MADE!

It was sometime during this process that I had the idea to mount my creations into a box from Amazon. I thought it would help in making seem a little more interactive? Rather than just dancing around with a cup full of lentils...

Draft #1:

Breath goes in... something something something... fake feathers move

It was late and I thought I would benefit from coming at it again in the morning, so I went to bed and dreamt about dancing around in a land of lentils. 

Prototype breath direction channel:

This think kind of reminds me of something else, but I just can't put my finger on it... I know, I'll jam out on my melodica to clear my head. 

Wait a minute, that might just be...

Perfect!

It's like it was made for this.

I ended up just getting rid of the plastic mouthpiece part entirely and rolling the feathers up and sliding them into the end of the mouthpiece from the melodica. It actually reminds me a little of the flailing tube people at car dealerships, so maybe I would call this output a "dance as well!

At the time of writing, I think I may be at a finishing point of sorts. I did drill an extra hole in the box for no reason whatsoever so maybe I will dream up a possibility for it tonight. #workinprogress