Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

After a few busy weeks I’ve finished my finals and moved into a new apartment (if you can guess I’m not exactly built for moving furniture from one third floor apartment to another). It’s finally summer. But now that I’m finished I just want to get back to work. I suppose that’s just how I am, but fortunately I have a long list of summery projects.

I’m spending a chunk of my summer working at the MICA Pre-College program as a Teachers Assistant/Residence Counselor (TARC). I’m very excited for the opportunity to share my skills with a younger group of developing artists and show them around Baltimore. I’ll also be interning for the rest of the summer in a design studio in the harbor, which I’m sure will be a great experience as well.

One of the first things I’m working on is a re-design of my site. After many many iterations I eventually decided to just cut my site down to the essentials, making it as simple and functional as I could. Unfortunately it’s not very exciting. I’ve been working in web design and development for a while now, but still my abilities are increasing so fast that with every site I create the one before it, or even the one I just finished, looks like garbage. Fortunately the other site I’m finishing up still looks decent, so maybe I’m getting somewhere. My new site will have a more interesting, friendly design, some new features and more interactive toys, and a sprinkling of fancy Flash and JavaScript effects. I’ve got a few other web projects cued up, including a big site about Data Visualization, a couple of WordPress Themes, and hopefully some Flash games just for fun.

My friends and I also have long list of movies to watch, some new recipes to try (sushi & samosas! but not together), some vegetables to grow on our new deck. And of course some new art.

I’ve been interested in experimenting with electronic music for a while now and also recently started doing some work with the Arduino. So I thought, ‘why not try both?’ I began with a great article I found on Make Magazine (one of my absolute favorite sites) to create the basic script to generate an audio signal with an Arduino. A Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) converts the binary outputs from the Arduino into a relatively fluid scale of voltages which make up the sound wave

On the electronics side, my setup is quite similar to my reference, with the addition of a small amplifier using an LM386 op amp chip and a couple resistors and capacitors for some basic filtering. On the code side I’ve created a much more substantial instrument. Using Processing I built an interface to create a 32 sample waveform and a melody. The data is sent live to the Arduino which places the data into it’s waveform array and then using a timer writes each value sequentially to the DAC to create the sound.

The interface contains two sets of sliders. One represents the shape of the sound wave. Changing the shape alters the timbre of the sound. The second set controls a series of pitches. The currently playing note is lit and a light bar indicates the current position of the playhead. The waveform sliders can be adjusted individually or as a group by clicking and dragging across the set. The sequence bars control both the pitch and the frequency of the notes.

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