…Virtual Vomit…

SmackTop 0.1 Demo

By Altitude Sickness

Here’s a walkthrough to help you get SmackTop running:

SmackTop 0.1 Demo from Altitude Sickness on Vimeo.

Monomeet Performance

By Altitude Sickness

Check out this video of my performance at the recent Monomeet:

Altitude Sickness @ Monomeet 10/3/09 from Altitude Sickness on Vimeo.

There is a bit of information on the Vimeo page…but I thought I’d explain a more about what’s going on here, as it may not be immediately obvious to the first time viewer. I won’t bore you here with monome-specific software details, but essentially I’m running 6 channels of audio out of mlr into Ableton Live and modifying FX + transport parameters in Live using the other monome, a nanoKontrol, and (last but not least) SmackTop. My MacBookPro is on a flexible stand made out of PVC, wood, velcro and a garage-door spring. I may post schematics for this later, once I finalize the design. I’m controlling a few key parameters during the set by tilting my laptop: in the beginning of the set I’m modifying the delay on the annoying repeated vocals and at the very end of the set I use it to bring everything out with a high-pass filter. I’m also launching a percussive sample in the beginning by hitting my laptop, though its hard to see in the video. Any questions?

Here are links to the software I’m using:
For any Mac laptop > 2005:
-SmackTop!
monome:
-mlr_aes_mdb
-midi_bends http://princeton.edu/~rweiteka/midi_bends_0.3G_RAW.zip
-midi_bends midi remote script:
NanoKontrol:
-nanokontrol midi remote script:

SmackTop 0.1

By Altitude Sickness

SmackTop 0.1 seems an appropriate jumping off point for this blog.  Its an open-source application written in Processing and Chuck which allows the user to send MIDI + audio by tilting + smacking their Mac laptops.

SmackTop can be downloaded here.  There is also a reasonably well-documented wiki.

Here’s my first demo video of it in action (meant for headphones):

all in all from Altitude Sickness on Vimeo.

There will be many more related things to come…hang tight.