Me and My Soldering Iron

Now I got curious! After I created the Lissajous visualization of Bachs Prelude in C yesterday, I was wondering what other figures I could get out of this music. When using lissajous figures the two axis are perpendicular and independent from each other. When using a harmonograph an additional rotational movement is added, which changes the apperance of the figures drawn. By adding a phase shift of 90 degrees to the second frequency, the unison is now represented as a circle instead of a line.

If I find the time I will make this sketch interactive so you can play with the various parameters and see how I alters the shapes drawn by the music.

Aug 27, 2017 • Share / Permalink

Yesterday I was at the openeing of a new exhibition in the HNF where the canadian artist Todd McLellan was presenting his great photographs of taken apart devices. At this evening I met Tim Rodenbröker and Patrik Hübner, two media artists from Paderborn that create art by coding. We had a great chat and they were telling me about their bach-project, an exploration about visualizing the beauty of music.

I was thrilled by the idea, so I decided to give it a shot myself and to brush up on my processing skills. And here is the result: A visualization of Bachs famous prelude in c. The idea is to take the frequency of the left hand notes as a base (for the x-axis) and then visualize the ratio to the right hand notes using lissajous curves. While the left hand note is played, both frequencies are the same, which generates the line pattern. If the frequencies differ many different curves evolve, whose pattern depend on the ratio between the x- and y-frequencies.

Aug 25, 2017 • Share / Permalink

After two years of working with Bastian Bloessl in the same office, he will leave next month to head over to Dublin. Since he is a HAM enthusiast and was learning morse code for the last months, I decided to get him a special farewell present: A USB-Morse-Key! The Idea: Attach a morse key to an Arduino Micro (or any other version with an ATmega32U4 chip), decode the morse code and use the Arduino to send keystrokes to the computer.

My first idea was to build a morse key by myself, but last weekend on the Maker Faire Ruhr I found a guy selling loads of old electronics.

Mar 28, 2017 • Share / Permalink

After years of trying to avoid it, despite of friends telling me to do so, I finally did it: I’ve started a blog! I figured, one more can’t do any harm, but maybe it can even do some good.

Mar 27, 2017 • Share / Permalink