For this week, I prepared a sort of mini theremin. Looking around the room, I noticed that everyone’s projects were neatly configured with a minimal amount of wire, and a very clean appearance. Mine had ratty remnants of past projects hanging up to a foot off the breadboard and wires wrapping all over the place to dubious-looking electronics components. You would have no idea what to do with it if I didn’t expain.
I think the lesson is that both appearances have a use – on the one hand, the incomprehensible mess intimidates and awes the viewer and leads naturally to wild gesticulations and exaggerations, on the other hand, a neat appearance garners esteem from your peers and seems to open the room to honest conversation about the inner-workings of the piece. Both approaches focus on the technology, and preoccupy the viewer with technical details. If I have time, I will try to completely enclose my next project to focus on the meaning and intention of the piece.
The mini theremin had two modes. The first used a potentiometer to vary the pitch, the other used a photoresistor to detect hand proximity (IR or sonar would have been better, of course). A switch changed between the two. The BX-24 has a FreqOut command that allows you to vary the pitch, but it’s rather limited. Also, a pre-amp was necessary but missing since the volume was almost inaudible on my tiny radio-shack speaker (Jamie Allen built a great-sounding pre-amp for his project which he intends to share on his site). But considering I built the thing that morning, I find it reassuring that here at ITP building a theramin prototype in a few hours is no big deal – because it’s really not – the emphasis is on ideas which are more difficult. People outside of this field don’t understand how easy and banal it is to follow directions and wire a couple of sensors up to a little chip.
I experimented with correlating knob and sensor movement with actual pitch change, and did not come up with a good solution to correlate the two. The knob only changed the pitch until it was turned 180 degrees, not the full 360 as you’d expect.. I’m interested in controlling and playing with the sensitivity and range of the sensors, and hope to update this page with my findings on how exactly to do that.