The other highlight of my Cambridge trip was staying with some new friends from MIT's Media Lab, Cati Vaucelle and Adam Boulanger. Cati is a disarmingly beautiful yet razor sharp grad student in the Tangible Media Group and Adam is part of the Hyper instruments group and is the most low-key super genius I've ever met. They're both MaxMSP wizards already so it was great to be able to work on my beginner apps and get their help. I showed them both my old Guitar Games and Piano Games applications and they were very enthusiastic about my efforts. It was extremely encouraging for me to watch them try the games out and make very insightful comments about what they liked and what could be improved. One of the big problems I had when developing these applications is that I got very little feedback. My plan now is to create a web page where people can download my creations (free and open-sourced) and get involved in the improvement of games by testing the games, making suggestions for game ideas, and even reprogramming them!

After the workshop was over, I visited Cati and Adam's groups at the Media Lab. I had followed Cati's work from her blog but half of the time I was uncertain if her projects were just ideas or if they were actually real-life creations. Well, as you can tell from the group's name "Tangible Media" most of what Cati blogs about are real things. She demonstrated various "experiments" for me like perfume bottles that play music and her video editing system for children. Adam's lab was an amazing place as well. There I met Craig Lewiston who is creating a glove / keyboard system that helps teach piano by forcing your hand to play the piano with magnetic fields that at first repel your finger and then attract your finger down onto a key. I showed him Piano Games and I hope he can use the graphics from it in his project. Adam showed me some very advanced MaxMSP programs he created in which a P5 gaming glove could be used to generate lush sounds. These sounds were created by Csound, the book for which was written/edited by Adam's father Richard. The next day Adam gave us a Csound tutorial and now, in addition to MaxMSP, I have Csound to explore. The Csound book looks like it will be a great way for me to learn about synthesis techniques and effect processing.

I really didn't want to leave Cambridge, but I had a meeting with my publisher. Plus, fish and guests stink after three days... and it had already been six days!