Hero of Alexandria

So I just watched this program on the History Channel about Heron of Alexandria. Wow!!! This guy was genius! In case you’ve never heard of him, as was my condition earlier this evening, here’s the lowdown. First century A.D. this guy was in Alexandria, birthing such marvels as miraculous, automatic temple doors, steam engines, automatic weaponry, and 20 minute progressions of theatre presentations! To spare the details, I saw a lot of things that he did artistically, or which could be interpreted as such. If you get a chance, look into some of his work. Here’s probably the best link I found after much google searching.

Delays are helpful.

I thought and searched and experimented and repeated the process a couple more times before I found the function to make my Pd program work: “Delay.” Delay is a function that does exactly what you’d expect it to. Just make an object, name it “delay” and follow that with the argument of how much time you want it to wait after receiving a signal from the input before it sends a bang through the output. I noticed a couple of other people in the class had found it as well. Awesome.

I guess it’s a bug.

Ok, when working in Pd, I found that if I made a message to interpolate between the values of 0 and oh, let’s say 15, over maybe 4 seconds to be sent to a line that controls a sound. That sound will continue at that magnitude (15) unless it is stopped via control or disconnect. If you look closely at the section of my Primitive Techno Machine that the slider controls, you’ll see that I used another message to send a zero value to manually shut this effect off, which is in addition to the two message-line combo’s that simply create the rising and falling sounds. So keep that in mind if you use the message function to do such tasks, or any other function that works in a similar way. I’m sure there will be similar “bugs” there also.

I just uploaded my pd program.

Yup, just uploaded it. So check it out my Primitive Techno Machine.

A couple ideas:

Idea #1: Shoes that play techno beats synchronously as you walk. This will give those who struggle with OCD a bit of artistic confidence. The most basic implementation would be to have the short, low-frequency tones play with each step, and depending on the speed, a different accompany of tones will play. To make it more complex, and perhaps more fun, it could be programmed to play other tones manually through some other method (perhaps a twist of one foot as it steps could trigger another sound). Pragmatically thinking, I can think of three ways to implement it. 1. Put logic chips in some shoes 2. Attach some sensors to them with wires or 3. Build off those step counters to capture the electric impulses.

Idea #2: I’m not completely sure, but I think that even the best/quickest artists take a while to draw a face based on a person’s description. So what I suggest is a computer that would draw faces (and I suppose the rest of the body) based on a given description. I see this being helpful in criminal investigation. The cool thing would be for the “witness” to orally describe the “suspect” and the computer would interpret it and render a representative drawing based on the description. The second best implementation would mean typing in the description. I think this would be cool because it would be fast, and depending on how well it is made, has the potential to be somewhat accurate in its representations.

Another thought: Even if something has been done before, doing it a different way is just as valuable as doing it for the first time.