Getting Ready for MassCUE

We've been scrambling a bit this week to get ready for our MassCUE presentation.  There are some logistics to sort out re: the equipment we are bringing- Raspberry Pi's, Makey Makeys, laptops, speakers and the necessary power cords and audio cables.  The trickiest bit is that setting up WiFi on the Pi is a bit of a chore and rather than trying to do that on the fly at the conference, we have shared the MacBook's internet connection with the Pi via internet.  Since we want to run the Pi headless, this solution means we don't have to drag along a keyboard, mouse and monitor to set up the Pi's WiFi on site.  It is also possible to ssh into the Pi from a connected Mac or even use X-forwarding, but this solution seemed simplest and one that we could test in advanced.  As of yesterday, it worked!

Continued progress...

We have further developed our goal of creating customizable electronic instruments, using the Raspberry Pi and Makey Makey, by striving to make the devices completely wireless when used in a performance context.  This week, we met with success by adding a Wi-Pi USB wireless adapter, as well as X-Mini MAX XAM15 rechargeable stereo speakers.  In experimenting with solar power to run the Pi, we found what we think to be a lack of power for what the Pi is doing.  We will be looking into alternative solar power options.  

My 'Music Technology Lab' students are in the process of using a free iPad app called Voice Recorder Pro in order to collect a variety of sound samples.  They will then save their samples to their Google Drive and open them in Ableton Live 9 Intro for further editing and sound design.  Although I considered having them use Audacity for this purpose, they are already using Live for other production and music creation purposes.  So I have decided to use this sampling project to also help further develop their understandings of Live.

Looking forward to brainstorming about the design component of the instruments!

Breakthrough

Our goal is to use the Pi with the Makey Makey to build custom instruments which play sampled sounds.  To start with, we need to get the audio working on the Pi and have it boot, login and automatically start an audio program.  For testing purposes we used Pianobar, a command line Pandora player.   After a lot of tweaks, including reprogramming the Makey Makey with Arduino software, we have success.  See the Pandora's Box page for the details.