.apb.

Musicals that rock

aure@aure.com (Aurelius Prochazka) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:22:00 GMT

Well, my first web update is kind of strange. I've added a page on aure.com listing my favorite musicals. I used to hate musicals, but lately I've found quite a few I like. Joss Whedon just released a great new musical/comedy online, check it out:

Back blogging

aure@aure.com (Aurelius Prochazka) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:42:00 GMT

Alright, so I doubt anybody cares, but I am going to start blogging again. Unfortunately I go on these blogging streaks which are then followed by long dry spells. This last dry spell was almost a year long.

As a quick update to what I've been doing in the last year: the short version is that I'm working for Cool Earth Solar in Livermore, California. I actually bought a house up here and everything.

So, why start blogging again now? Well, my main goal is to make better versions of all my web sites and use this blog as a summary of all the things I update online. So, even though it's been a while, I hope you stay tuned and keep me honest - ie. bug me if I am not updating this blog or my sites.

RailsSpace is out!

aure@aure.com (Aurelius Prochazka) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 09:01:00 GMT

Guitaraoke - Guitar Hero Revolution

aure@aure.com (Aurelius Prochazka) — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:25:00 GMT

Red Octane just announced their upcoming game “Rock Band” in which friends can play together as a band with one player for each of the roles of singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer. Needless to say, I am pretty excited about this game since I have been a music game junkie for a long time now.

Red Octane’s strength is that they made the rhythm game genre fun again. Guitar Hero was a masterpiece of execution, especially the way complexity increased by song within each difficulty level. I tried the Hard level when I first started playing the game and I was booed off stage. I went back down to Easy and played the game linearly through until I had five stars on almost every song – on Expert level!

Red Octane’s weekness is that they don’t have many original gameplay ideas. Guitar Hero was basically the Japanese game Guitar Freaks repackaged with an infinitely better song choice.

Now, Red Octane’s “Rock Band” is another repackaging – Karaoke Revolution plus Guitar Hero (x2 for bass) and DrumMania all in one. While I am sure it will be great fun, I also worry that it will be a whole lot of rhythmic clicking and only one person getting pitch training.

One of my lifelong goals has been to develop a pitch training game that is as much fun as Guitar Hero. While I am working on that in my spare time, I’ve also hacked together a pretty fun “Guitaraoke Revolution” game that is an amazing guitar and ear workout. Here’s what you need to do:

Splice your Karaoke Revolution microphone so that the microphone ends in a plug and the USB converter end has a jack like this:

I used mini plugs and jacks and then put a quarter inch adaptor on the mini plug jack to allow for plugging in a traditional guitar cable.

I don’t recommend plugging in the guitar direct for the following reasons:

The guitar output level may be too low.
The direct sound is lame, you want some nice effects!
Karaoke Revolution has some inherent delay (perhaps as a feedback reducer for the expected microphone input).

So, plug your guitar into your effect processor / amp and send the Playstation the output from a headphone jack or perhaps a Send jack on your amp or mixer. There are many ways to do this and I won’t get into that.

Then, in the mic set up, get the volume within Karaoke Revolution’s acceptable range, and turn the mic output volume to zero so you don’t hear the delay. For game play, it’s up to you whether you want to hear the vocals (maybe you want to be reminded how the song goes) or if you want to turn them down (like in real Karaoke).

I think that’s about it.

YouTube Videos

Just so you know what you’re striving for, here’s “Guitaraoke” in action on YouTube:

Unchained Melody:

Every Breath You Take:

Note: The guitar is one of my weird guitars – with fretboard markers and colors defined by the ebony and ivory on a piano keyboard. The fretboard was designed by Aaron Wolfson but hasn’t really caught on, but I love it! The white and black guitar also has a Sustainer pickup in it and Bigsby vibrato for a nice vocal expressiveness.

I encourage other YouTubers to record their own performances and label it with the “Guitaraoke” tag and I’ll link to you.

Incidentally, you can hack together a Singstar guitar game even more easily than Karaoke Revolutions. Just get a mini plug jack that is small enough to fit into the Singstar audio to USB converter (or melt down a Radio Shack cable to fit) and plug your guitar in. The only problem is that Singstar does not give you the option to turn off the incoming vocals, so you have to hear your guitar coming through with a pretty long and annoying delay. Karaoke Revolution’s triangle showing real-time pitch is better than Singstar’s after-the-fact results display anyway.

Learning Guitar This Way

I think if you guitarists out there try this Guitaraoke exercise, you’ll really be surprised about how good of a training tool it is. There are so many people who have guitar muscle memory and a database of riffs in their head who might sound pretty good, but if you can’t make your guitar sing, then how good are you really?

Make Project 1

aure@aure.com (Aurelius Prochazka) — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:40:00 GMT

I have to admit that while I LOVE Make Magazine, I never tried one of the projects until now. I made this:

which is a sensor interface that communicates with the computer via MIDI. This makes it ideal for working with MaxMSP and that part of the project was trivial. The sensor hanging off the left side is a photocell which is configured to send control change messages via MIDI.

Hopefully this will be the first of many more completed Make Projects.

My life defined, at age 11

aure@aure.com (Aurelius Prochazka) — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 12:07:00 GMT

Recently I found this report card I got in elementary school, check out the amazingly accurate hand-written assessment (especially the last sentence):

(click for full size)

Some things to note – Mrs. Cambareri’s hand-writing is incredible! It looks like my Mac’s cursive font! I don’t know about the check marks – she claims I always respect authority, yet I never gave the bottom half to my Mom to sign.

Mrs. Cambareri if you are out there, email me! You were a great teacher.

RailsSpace Update

aure@aure.com (Aurelius Prochazka) — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:36:00 GMT

RailsSpace has been released as a rough cut on Safari...

Michael and I are still doing author reviews and in addition I'm creating the accompanying web site for the book.

Math in Futurama Lecture

aure@aure.com (Aurelius Prochazka) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 02:23:00 GMT

Recently Michael Hartl turned me on to to L.A.'s Math Club, an irregular gathering of math and science enthusiasts. The club was started by Roni Brunn and includes quite a few interesting people, some of whom are writers for the TV show Futurama. So, out of the blue yesterday I got an email invitation from the co-creator of the show, David (X.) Cohen asking for people to come watch a video taping of a lecture entitled "Math in Futurama" which will be included in an upcoming Futurama DVD release. Well, how often do you get a chance to respond to the creator of one your favorite shows? So, of course I replied "let me come!" and told him that "Jurassic Bark" was just about the finest half hour of television ever. He responded with "Just about? We were so close!" David said that there will be a bunch of the writers at the taping, including Eric Kaplan, who wrote that episode. Meanwhile Michael Hartl was also planning to attend the lecture and I invited my friend Mike Vanier, a Caltech CS instructor. Oh yeah, we were ready to nerd up the place!

We arrived to the very small lecture room and started to mingle with various writers, most of all Ken Keeler, who was toting Hardy and Wright's "Introduction to the Theory of Numbers." It was amazing how bright the writers were - I learned that several of them had Ph.D.s. But, not only were they bright and extremely quick-witted, they were all completely down to earth. Speaking of that, Matt Groening (creator of the Simpsons as well as co-creator of Futurama) arrived and he was very affable and unassuming - completely different the stereotypical Hollywood television millionaire.

The lecture itself was pretty good, but it was the random interjections from the writers that made it hilarious. Of course, as he did in the Norah Jones concert, Michael Hartl got involved with the proceedings and should appear on the DVD as the nerd who knew the most digits of pi. I think Mike Vanier and I will also be on the DVD, just by virtue of being in the front row of a very small audience. Part of the lecture was a skit where the lecturer scolds Matt Groening for doodling in class - Mike Vanier managed to wind up with this sketch of Fry:

Finally, I just want to note how important it is for me to have contact with smart, vibrant people. Whether it was researching with David Hill at GALCIT, working with Philip and Eve at ArsDigita, traveling with Cindy, writing my book with Michael Hartl, talking about media projects with Cati and Adam, or chatting with the Futurama crowd, I'm at my best when there are smart, enthusiastic folks around me, and I need to remember that.

MIT Media Lab

aure@aure.com (Aurelius Prochazka) — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:23:00 GMT

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!

MaxMSP/Jitter Workshop

aure@aure.com (Aurelius Prochazka) — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 13:31:00 GMT

I feel good. I just came back to New York City after a week in Cambridge in which I had a great time.

The MaxMSP/Jitter workshop was very useful, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn multimedia programming. It was taught by the energetic and knowledgable Gregory Taylor and the audience was a mix of programmers, musicians and installation artists. Greg surprised me by saying “you’re the one who wrote the Rails book!” – he had looked up each of students online to get a sense for his audience. Of course, I had to correct him in that I wrote “a” Rails book, not “the” Rails book, which could only be DHH’s book. Greg thought I might be too advanced a programmer for the class, but he accepted me anyway. I’m glad he did because I never did the kind of graphical programming that MaxMSP uses.

Plus, without this workshop I probably would have kept procrastinating and never worked through the tutorials. The first day and a half of lectures were excellent, but because MaxMSP can do MIDI, audio, and video, Greg’s attempts to cover it all led to a bit of a fractured presentation. To be fair, this was the first time he was doing a workshop that covered all three types of media at once (usually Jitter, the video component is a separate workshop). Anyway, the good news is that after a couple of years removed from doing my music game programming, I built my first new music trainer in MaxMSP. It’s a simple little application in which two notes play, one droning sound that is constant, and one that you control the pitch of using a Playstation type game pad. Once you make the two notes match, the drone note changes and the sequence repeats. I call the game “Tone Deaf” invaders and I think it’s a good exercise. As I get more experienced with MaxMSP I will make it more fun, more of a game. Details on that should follow in this blog, time permitting.