Update on news…

This month’s new demo is one to illustrate Bode Plots. Not a very complicated one, but my programming time has been dedicated to other tasks recently – most notably some way to automate and speed up getting feedback to students for the 450 lab scripts I’ve been marking, as well as entering the resultant marks into the database here. I’ve also been working on a little application that looks out from a webcam, spots movement, and transforms the movement into patterns of light and sound. It’s rather fun.

Why? Well, apart from being fun, we have over here something called the Illuminating York festival. It’s a tourist thing – it’s in late October when there aren’t as many tourists around, and there’s lots of spare rooms in the B&Bs. Anyway, some of these lightworks (is that a word?) come with sound accompanying them, and I thought it might be interesting to make an interactive one. Point a webcam at a street, and convert the movement of the passers-by to patterns of light and sound. Then I bumped into an old acquaintance who works in music therapy for Accessible Arts who expressed an interest, so I adapted it to see if it would be of any use to them. Very interesting this – and nice to get such direct feedback. I think there is perhaps something I can do, but it would be so much better if I could get a Kinect hooked up so I can eliminate all the movement going on behind the “player”. That was, I think, the most obvious problem with the prototype.

On the plus side, all teaching has now finished until October, so with luck I’ll be able to keep to the original plan of one demo per month over the summer. I’ve no idea what the next one will be though – perhaps something to do with Markov Chains or MAC Protocols – I’m due to start teaching both of those in the next academic year. I’ll try and get some more chapters of the book up as well.

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