project ideas
These are projects I had to write down to get out of my head. Are you
interested in collaborating? Are you working on these things? Email
me!
- can we use a vector “direction” to explore neighbors of a piece of
music?
- I’ve seen someone use a vector direction to modify the length of a
piece of text while maintaining the semantics (to a point.)
- what does that look like when we have an embedding of a piece of
music? can we even produce embeddings of a piece of music?
- midi wheel controller
- 3 dials: select a scale, select the start and stop notes
- the wheel: trigger the notes - faster wheel, faster notes, etc.
- with a little rubber tire, you could lash/clamp it to other rotating
things, or attach it to something else with a rubber belt to sonify any
rotating object.
- a game where you are an underground radio DJ for the revolution and
you have to hit the right tone in your broadcasts (as graded by an LLM)
or you get torn apart by rabid revolutionaries/the institutions you are
revolting against.
- an LLM embedding playground where you can mess with directions and
examine the output live.
- educational construction kits made from cheap processed wood
materials (bamboo chopsticks, wooden rulers/yardsticks, tongue
depressors, etc) and 3d-printed joints.
- umbrella-based “digital mirror” (either those little paper drink
umbrellas, or if you’re ambitious, a genuinely massive display composed
of full-size umbrellas.
- sd-based “mixtape” recorder.
- this is a straightforward replication of cassette technology with SD
cards.
- to my mind, the exciting/interesting things about cassette recorders
are: you can record audio from any aux cable, they’re cheap to
produce/share, and they are simple to use in interesting ways.
- zip tie synthesizer.
- pulling a fingernail across a zip tie generates a tone based on the
speed with which you pull.
- So building an instrument out of it is as simple as making a
physical loop of zip-tie material, and running it across something
suitable fingernail-ish with a motor that’s controlled by the midi
message or control-voltage from your keyboard.
- repurpose mechanical-keyboard-style numpads that are programmable
with QMK as midi controllers/simple samplers.
- I should check existing work on this, as QMK
has midi already
- there are sweet little numpad kits that have rotary encoders and LED
displays already. This feels like music-capable hardware that should be
heavily used already! I’m surprised I haven’t seen much yet.
- this also could be a straightforward hack of a standard calculator,
if you have the soldering skills to get in there and cut traces, solder
on jumper wire, etc.
- a p5.js playground that lets you drag the various HTML elements
around the page.
- At the moment, adding sliders and other controls to p5.js sketches
involves a bit of a shift to begin styling the various page
elements.
- I’d rather be able to just add a slider in the code, hit “update”
and have the new slider appear on screen and interactive
immediately.
- this is almost veering towards something like touch-designer, but
substantially less powerful and without the data-flow “patch”
paradigm.
- https://stranger.video but for
making exquisite
corpse creative coding projects.
- first it pairs you with a random stranger in the queue:
- then you have 30 seconds to make an edit to the p5 project
template.
- once you’re done, click “pass”.
- I think there are a lot of security considerations here - an
unexperienced programmer could have some pretty bad client-side code
introduced to their site, live.
- long exposure photographs of harmonographs moving light, rather than
drawing with a pen.
- web-based digital “printmaking” studio
- In printmaking, it’s often straightforward and creatively
interesting to print textures found in everyday life. We can’t do that
with computers, even though there are lots of “textures” available in
our computing experience.
- I’m envisioning a sort of “station” that you paste harvested
“textures” (aka screenshots) into and then can play with threshold,
color, etc of the resulting “print”. Ideally there’d be an export into
formats that are straightforward to embed elsewhere, like into websites
as background images.
- yes, this is easily accomplished with standard image editing
software, but limitations/focus are what make tools interesting to me.
Photoshop/Gimp/etc are powerful, general tools. I like specialized, fun
tools (that maybe aren’t quite so powerful, but are more enjoyable,
creatively fulfilling, and easy to pick up.)
- paper disk-based oscillator synthesizer. Spinning paper (or clear
acetate, to allow layering) disks spin above a light source but beneath
a photoresistor which controls the voltage going out to the speaker.
You’d end up with different disks for different wave types, square,
triangle, sine, etc. A potentiometer controls the speed of the disks.
Human intervention in the form of flashlights or friction on the disks
can mess with the sound. Great for educational displays of how sound
waves work.
- pen plotter
- I love all this stuff. vpype is a powerful tool
that’s worth experimenting with.
- probably want to build my own plotter? I’m particularly intrigued by
the prospect of building one using only the parts and tools that come
with an Ender 3 printer kit. There are many of those printers drifting
around, and they are a ready and cheap source of aluminum extrusion,
stepper motors, and control boards.
- using mylar and circular displays in digital kaleidoscope displays.
A viewport, lined with mylar, around a circular display. There is some
precedent of this type of thing from video artists, and I think it would
be fun to build my own.
- semantic search across bookmarked content. Using something like the
Firefox “readability” algorithm to isolate the worthwhile text in a
webpage and then a vector database and language model to search across
the content. Could then link it with a personal note-taking system. Like
having a personal librarian whose job is tagging and identifying work
related to what I’m already thinking about. Because maintaining an
“antilibrary” of links is much more difficult than maintaining an
antilibrary of physical books.
- I guess an alternative here is just a browser for my own bookmarks
that makes it easier to review and pick from the saved links, versus the
current state of affairs which is just seeing page titles.
- simple musical effect toys like https://www.brandnewnoise.com/ are
super inspiring. In particular, these projects feel like the epitome of
a portal between or bridge across the analog-digital divide. The
seemless intregration and playfulness of them is just perfect.
- Fresnel lenses have lots of potential for interesting
lighting/display effects. Even just mounting them in front of RGB led
matrices produces beautiful effects.
- I think you could build a fascinating art display using a stretchy
fabric pulled across an empty picture-frame, with physical actuators
that push the fabric out from behind.
- Probably use servo motors that are multiplexed to a microcontroller
that accepts a serial “frame” that indicates which ones should be poking
out.
- Solenoids would be satisfyingly mechanical, but take so much power
to drive. If you ran them fast enough, you could probably use the
ripples on the fabric itself to animate/display images, summing the
resulting waves. This feels reminiscent of Chladni
figures
- interactive “terrarium” you can put in your website.
- The more you click, the more it grows.
- Should live behind the content of the site, and fail gracefully if
the user has JS turned off. User toggle is reasonable also.
- Like (orb.farm)[https://orb.farm] but a little more
minimal/low-resource.
- 3D printed fipple flute adapter.
- The difficult geometry of the fipple itself can be 3D printed, and
then it clamps like a collet onto standard galvanized steel electrical
conduit with fingerholes drilled into them. This makes producing a
family of tin whistles in different keys straightforward.
- Remains to be seen if steel conduit is an adequate resonator for
this type of instrument. If not, copper plumbing pipe would serve just
as well, but is more expensive (rougly 3x as much.)
- huh, this has been done with PVC pipe!
https://www.printables.com/model/565826-34-pvc-flute-recorder-mouthpiece
- I’ll have to print up a few of these and make an Irish low
whistle.
- Could use this also to produce easy/cheap drone flutes. Two flutes
in the same key, smashed side by side. One has pentatonic minor
fingering, the other is just the root with no finger holes.
- music discovery interface that emphasizes the things that are
appealing about physical media.
- an active hunt for new discoveries, not just an IV-drip of
algorithmically selected music. This is also something that (I’m told)
piracy had in the olden days.
- physicality
- accidental discoveries and surprises.
- I’m thinking something that uses round aluminum NFC tags, with
labels stuck to them. Place them in the “player”. Also some are “radio
stations” while others are albums. Some physical interface for saving a
currently playing song to a new tag, like a sort of “clone” so that you
can physically “record” a mixtape from other albums/radio streams.
- I think the simplest prototype of this is just having NFC tags with
Spotify URIs written to them. That should open Spotify when you
tap the tag to your phone. Building this into a bluetooth speaker using
an old phone that’s on the home wifi should be enough to tell me if this
is a feasible/fun project.
- a little calendar you can put on your website. It should read a
simple text file to populate events, and produce also an RSS feed. A
tool to read .ico files and append them to the text file would be nice
too.
- generative art webpage that uses microphone to generate visuals
based on your breathing rate.
- Visual poem webpages
- I am in love with cinemagraphs.
- Maybe I’ll start with a visual accompaniment to some older public
domain poetry, like
- pizzaman: a silly little platformer where you play as a pizza pie.
Maybe you shoot pizza slices, which means your health goes lower? and
then powerups are toppings! and you get health from defeating enemies,
who turn into little pizza slices when they die.
- node-based CAD with jscad and react-flow
- stellody (stella (star), melody) (using p5.js)
- a simple application that plays music inspired/controlled by the
stars that are passing directly overhead at the current
time/longitude.
- https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/ might be the tool
- using azimuth calculations I think?
- bee flappy-bird where you play kazoo to raise the bee
- 4-directional vvvvvv
- bitmap-to-midi converter. A “bitmap musicbox”, p5.js
- needs to accept a csv, as well as a definition of what headings go
to which sound things and which plot things.
- can also define a
data->csv conversion, so you can
use an actual bitmap file format, for example. but converting to CSV is
easiest.
- allows uploading/pasting a file so you can paste any bitmap
- art history game, mapping images to artistic movements. scored based
on speed of categorization and correctness
- pigeon shitting platformer (you play as the pigeon)
- eat powerups (pizza = shit better, bagel = another life, etc
etc.)
- microphone based breath controller for midi
- piano tuning webgame
- constrainted writing wordle/contact
- I particularly like the idea of using chaucer or saxon/roman word
restrictions. Or things like avoiding
e.
- OmniChord emulator/inspired instrument.
- VJ interface inspired by vim registers.
- config file defines imported video/music and saved registers (can
load at runtime too.)
- type a command and then hit
@<register> to
trigger the command with that data.
- knitting machine that produces one scarf every year
- text generator/filter for old Dymo style labels