Hello! My name is Sandy and I will be facilitating our workshop this weekend at Science Gallery Melbourne! We will be creating small noisy soft sculptures together, where we will embroider our own stories into sensors that can be used to make sounds in an electronic synthesiser system. In the workshop, we will be working with the DaisySeed embedded computer for music, with the MPR121 capacitive sensor.
To make sure we get the most out of our time together this weekend, it would be great if you came to the workshop plugdata prepared on the laptop you will be using for the workshop. plugdata is a free, open-source patching environment based on Pure Data and you can install it from their website. The installer will prompt you to select which plug-ins to download, we will only need the ‘standalone app’, so feel free to unselect all the other plug-ins.
If you have any concerns or questions, we can sort them out on the day of the workshop!
The workshop will be split into 2 sections, the first focused on programming our own synthesisers and wiring it up to a capacitive sensor, and the second section will be making our actual soft sculptural sensors through sewing and embroidery. Please let the SGM team know if you have any access needs prior to the workshop.
Here are the files you will need for today’s workshop: link
The slides for I used for the workshop can be found at the following: link
This workshop was built on the fantastic work Takumi Ogata has done over at Electro-Smith (the DaisySeed folks). (Link to their resource).
I used the DaisySeeds for this workshop as they are more afforable and are compatible with Arduino IDE and related resources. In my practice, I use the Bela more frequently, and they have a fantastic knowledge base and community online.
Here’s some more resources on getting started in the PureData language:
Andrew Brown’s Youtube Playlist: “Real-Time Music and Sound with Pure Data”
Charles Martin’s Intro to computer music in Pd
Here is a list of materials used in the workshop and where I purchased them from. The Daisy and MPR121 sensors were both online only (here in Kamberri at least).
Sewing materials were sourced from Spotlight!
Thank you so much for coming to the Hyperfocus workshop! I’m working on trying to get a mailing list in order but in the meantime, please feel free to reach out to me via my Instagram or by email ([email protected]).