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Electric Eyes and CV-MIDI Converter



Dennis,

Thanks for the sonar links! I had done a little nosing around, but was
unsuccessful. Another thing I've been trying to find is some sort of
inexpensive, short-range "homing beacon" that would use radio signal
time-of-flight to calculate distance. That way, you avoid line-of-sight
problems. Then you could also hook up three or more and triangulate your
exact location! And you could adapt this idea to give a beacon to everyone
in the band with a different homing frequency... (btw, GPS is too coarse
and slow to use)

[what follows is a generally-directed explanation of the eyes and such]

This all comes from a desire to be able to capture the performer's location
onstage (X/Y or theta/r). I do a lot of solo playing, and I am trying to
maximize the amount of data I can send back to my rig to affect the
performance. Of course, one of the things I can do is "move around". But
with only a beginner's knowledge of electronics, I had to scale back my
goals accordingly. Thus, the electric eye scenario is a crude solution, but
a beginning nonetheless.

Stated simply, I have two sets of eyes (for starters) in a room. Both beams
criss-cross the room resulting in an X pattern. So if I move from one
quadrant to another, one or both of the eyes is activated. The voltage
generated goes to my CV-MIDI converter and I let Building Blocks "debounce"
the eyes and deal with the data as I see fit. So far, it has been selecting
different loops for the background, or occassionally making one half of the
room the "auto-wah" half. That sort of thing. I do all of my work in the
MIDI environment, but I'm sure this is something that could be adapted for
the EDP and it's ilk.

The sonar systems Dennis recommends give you a continuous response, unlike
the grainy 2x2 grid. So that's an area I want to pursue. If I want any more
detail with the eyes, I must assemble more set of transmitter- receivers
and change the room layout to get 2x3 or 3x3. You can easily see that this
quickly becomes impractical if you want any kind of fine control.

Another important point of all of this is the performance: since I use
MIDI, I drag the cable around with me. If anyone can recommend a wireless
MIDI solution (that isn't out of business), you will be forever praised. A
while back, someone suggested using a digital modem, but again my beginner
electronic knowledge has proved a barrier to handle the data rate
conversions and such. This, of course, is no problem for you analog folks.
But if anyone has any suggestions on such a rate converter, I'm all ears
(or eyes?).

What started this whole crusade? I once saw an episode of 3-2-1 Contact!
where they put a saxophonist in a room and attached a wireless mic to his
chest. Then they fed his pulse into some speakers in the room. First he
played casually with the beat, then ran in place for ten seconds and fired
off bebop riffs. It was really excellent. And then if anybody sees Laurie
Anderson, well, gizmo city!

I hope this answers everyone's questions and generates some interest.

Thanks for the bandwidth,
Tim

http://www.quiltedfish.com/html/tg/tginfo.htm -- for pop music