My fourth descent into ADD

Today I figured out how to easily turn the rock band drum set for Wii into a MIDI drum controller:

I did this with Junxion, a program that allows you to transform USB and wireless game controller input into MIDI data. I’ve seen demos of other MIDI rock band instruments online, but with the Wii instruments already in USB form this has to be the easiest setup yet. This also seems to have the lowest latency. Junxion is not free but a demo can be downloaded here:

http://www.steim.org/steim/junxion_v3.html

I’ve also used Junxion to turn other game controllers such as DDR dance pads into instruments. I’m using the old PowerPC version 1.4, but version 3 should work fine. Junxion 3 also now works with Wii remotes.

I just used the Studio Tight Kit preset in Ultrabeat in Logic for the drum sounds. Junxion automatically makes an input port which Logic recognizes and listens to.

My setup for this demo was this:

The steps are basically this:

• Plug in the drum controller.
• Launch Junxion.
• Turn off the other devices (USB Optical Mouse, Apple Keyboard, and Apple IR default to enabled at startup)
• Start hitting the pads and watch which sensor status is triggered. Your MIDI app should be sounding or at least receiving input. If not, select Junxion Port 1 as a MIDI input.
• Drag the value of the sensor’s “Dat1″ up or down to change it to the note value you want; for example I set the bass drum to 36 (C2) which triggers the bass drum in Ultrabeat.
• I muted sensor 8 because it was always sounding on any hit.

That’s it! Details may have changed in the new versions. If you have the full version you can save your configuration.

The Rock Band guitar works with Junxion as well! Just plug the USB receiver into the computer, turn on the guitar and follow the same steps. Now I’m even happier that I bought Rock Band!

I’ve been using this site I found about about, GCM Travel Stats, for predicting and analyzing Chicago traffic a lot lately. It works pretty well unless you get an unprecedented freak traffic spike like I did today:

It took me almost two hours to get from Midway to Uptown. I think it was the cubs game combined with the taste of chicago.

Oh well. My new hobby is to take pictures of the sky when I’m stuck in traffic. I’ve been watching them build this skyscraper from Columbia, and it’s really coming together. I figured out it’s the One Museum Park building. Click for larger version:

I started admiring this tree off of I-55 about a year and a half ago on my many trips to and from St. Louis from Chicago. I noticed it for its odd asymmetry and for its placement (all alone in a beautiful field on a farm).

It reminded me of that Shawshank Redemption quote–

I was even more struck to find in the summer that although it has been disfigured presumably by some large weather event, it is still alive and well. I resolved to take pictures of it some day, but drive by photos never worked well and the field was fenced off by the farm along the highway.

Well, today I decided to take the nearest exit and try and find a back road that would lead me to it. I found one and was looking left towards the highway for it until I almost ran into it on my right. It was on someone’s property, but close enough to the road that I could shoot it up close. The day had a magical quality to it (threatening to storm, humid and breezy, but perfectly warm and sunny) and being in the tree’s presence set my heart racing for some reason. It has a wonderful nook at its root (that I was tempted to climb inside but feared being chased off by angry armed farmers) and a beautiful stream nearby.

I wanted to spend all day with it or search for hidden lunchboxes, but this slashdot article came to mind.

Here is a slideshow of the photos I took of it:

http://flickr.com/photos/jordan314/tags/crazytree/show/

I also have a tag set of other cloud and chicago shots I took that day:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jordan314/tags/i55/

I’ve had two realizations about reality and the way the mind works. Sorry if this post is too random or metaphysical; they’ve been rattling around in my brain and I’d rather have them written down.

The first is that we typically think of knowledge as a tree: We are born as a root, and as we gain new information and memories, those become limbs and branches. This is true, but we are not the entire tree; our consciousness has to propagate through the limbs and branches in order to reach a memory or idea. This is not a new idea - we forget things all the time when those paths become broken or muddled. But nor are we the entire path of consciousness from the root to the leaf; think of the last time you’ve lost your train of thought. What happened when you said, “What were we talking about?” This wouldn’t happen if our consciousness was the entire length from root to leaf. In other words, it’s just as hard to get back to the root from the leaf as it is to get to the leaf from the root. Our consciousness has to be a tiny spark then in our brain, that in this case found its way from root to leaf but then lost its way back. I think “we” are a tiny spark, a pointer in this vast grey matter network of our brain.

The second thing is, I think our brain has refresh rates. It’s well known that our eyes have refresh rates; we can’t see the flicker of film or TV screens or alternating current light bulbs because our eyes’ refresh rates are too slow. Well, I think our brain does too. I think of it a lot like computers; computer memory has to take in information and write it down, take in memory and write it down; these cycles are calculated in kilohertz and are a measure of memory speed. Well our brain has to do this too; we are constantly processing and storing new information. I think it does this one at a time like computers do. I have experienced times where I think my brain’s refresh rate has gone out of whack; I heard audio stopping and echoing like a computer CPU processing too much audio information and having an audio dropout. This insight into my brain’s limited ability to perceive makes me wonder how much of the world we cannot perceive just by trusting our senses. Also, when I’m not feeling well, feeling very nervous, or am falling asleep, often my ‘pointer’ mentioned above goes in loops and gets stuck and I can only focus on a word or idea looping around. I’m not sure what all of this means but I think the idea of the loop and the spark are keys to understanding consciousness and reality.

I’m redesigning my front page but meanwhile here are some more videos from the past couple months. These are more orchestrations of Persichetti, Bartók and Faith rescored to a popular film:

Rural Games

Night Discovery

Both pieces were performed by members of the Chicago Civic Orchestra and conducted by Cliff Colnot.

Here are some new videos of work I’ve done.

I’m trying to think of ways of altering the original videos that I’m rescoring so that they seem fresh again. Here is another original video:

One idea I had was to overlay the video with an inset of the recording session and a scrolling score:

I am interested in data visualizations…Is this too much information? What other information would you want to see?

Finally, I thought of replacing the main character with Mario from the Mario Kart trailer driving, and then decided it would be way too much work to complete.

In the orchestration class I’m taking we have some very strict guidelines on how our sheet music should be formatted. I’m writing some scripts to detect notational errors in my scores based on these guidelines.

The first one I wrote detects if tuplets are marked below the staff. Our conductor requires us to have all tuplets marked above the staff.

This works on macs or linux (or cygwin on windows):

First export the file to a music XML file. File > Music XML > Export. Save it as test.xml in your home folder.

Then open up terminal and run this command:

tr ‘\r’ ‘\n’ < test.xml | egrep -i “tuplet.+below”

If you exported the file on windows, you can just run

egrep -i test.xml “tuplet.+below”

The tr command converts the line breaks from mac to unix for grep to output properly.

If you see something like “<tuplet number=”1″ placement=”below” type=”start”/>” then you have a tuplet below the staff somewhere, if you just see a line break then you don’t. I haven’t figured out yet how to have it tell you where in the file it is though. :/

Music XML is a powerful feature - it means you can mass find, manipulate, and replace elements in scores with a text editor if you search for the right things.

(Warning: Loud)

Seun Kuti is going on tour and coming to the House of Blues in Chicago June 30. You can bet I will be there. I have been a Fela Kuti fan for a long time, and saw a Femi Kuti concert a couple years ago which was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. Seun has taken over his dad’s Egypt 80 band and I can’t wait to see him.

Hmm, this is fun, I’ve added a new ’song ripoffs’ category.
Musiq’s “Girl Next Door”:

Beck’s “Debra”:

-edit-
Found the sample, it’s Ramsey Lewis’s My Love For You.

I recently heard Fort Minor’s Where’d You Go and thought it was pretty powerful and effective, until I realized it was the exact same song as Where Is The Love by The Black Eyed Peas. Same chord progression, same downtempo well produced beats, same simple female vocal chorus, same good slow rapping that overlaps with the chorus.
Original Where’d You Go:

Original Where Is The Love:

Some mashups from some others who have realized the same thing:

Better - how’d he isolate the vocals?

Worse pitch shifting and loop points, but uses more of Where Is The Love Chorus