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Looper's Delight
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Dennis, Thanks for the sonar links! I had done a little nosing around, but was unsuccessful. Another thing I've been trying to find is some sort of inexpensive, short-range "homing beacon" that would use radio signal time-of-flight to calculate distance. That way, you avoid line-of-sight problems. Then you could also hook up three or more and triangulate your exact location! And you could adapt this idea to give a beacon to everyone in the band with a different homing frequency... (btw, GPS is too coarse and slow to use) [what follows is a generally-directed explanation of the eyes and such] This all comes from a desire to be able to capture the performer's location onstage (X/Y or theta/r). I do a lot of solo playing, and I am trying to maximize the amount of data I can send back to my rig to affect the performance. Of course, one of the things I can do is "move around". But with only a beginner's knowledge of electronics, I had to scale back my goals accordingly. Thus, the electric eye scenario is a crude solution, but a beginning nonetheless. Stated simply, I have two sets of eyes (for starters) in a room. Both beams criss-cross the room resulting in an X pattern. So if I move from one quadrant to another, one or both of the eyes is activated. The voltage generated goes to my CV-MIDI converter and I let Building Blocks "debounce" the eyes and deal with the data as I see fit. So far, it has been selecting different loops for the background, or occassionally making one half of the room the "auto-wah" half. That sort of thing. I do all of my work in the MIDI environment, but I'm sure this is something that could be adapted for the EDP and it's ilk. The sonar systems Dennis recommends give you a continuous response, unlike the grainy 2x2 grid. So that's an area I want to pursue. If I want any more detail with the eyes, I must assemble more set of transmitter- receivers and change the room layout to get 2x3 or 3x3. You can easily see that this quickly becomes impractical if you want any kind of fine control. Another important point of all of this is the performance: since I use MIDI, I drag the cable around with me. If anyone can recommend a wireless MIDI solution (that isn't out of business), you will be forever praised. A while back, someone suggested using a digital modem, but again my beginner electronic knowledge has proved a barrier to handle the data rate conversions and such. This, of course, is no problem for you analog folks. But if anyone has any suggestions on such a rate converter, I'm all ears (or eyes?). What started this whole crusade? I once saw an episode of 3-2-1 Contact! where they put a saxophonist in a room and attached a wireless mic to his chest. Then they fed his pulse into some speakers in the room. First he played casually with the beat, then ran in place for ten seconds and fired off bebop riffs. It was really excellent. And then if anybody sees Laurie Anderson, well, gizmo city! I hope this answers everyone's questions and generates some interest. Thanks for the bandwidth, Tim http://www.quiltedfish.com/html/tg/tginfo.htm -- for pop music