Organ Donor Project

Load-in at theNAT

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Sun, 16 Oct 2016 18:14:00 +0000

Here's what Organ Donor looked like loaded onto the freight elevator for setup at the Natural History Museum.

Organ Donor at San Diego Maker Faire 2016

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 03:09:00 +0000

The experience at San Diego Maker Faire 2016 was outstanding in every way. Held at Balboa Park on 1-2 October 2016, Organ Donor Opus 1 was deployed int the Natural History Museum, aka theNAT.

Setup was Friday evening and went as flawlessly as it ever has. The new software that allows for much easier matching of note to valve offered the only real glitch. After three of the hundred twenty two pipes were taught, the cursor started moving all on its own all across the touchscreen. This made it impossible to assign the right pipe to the right valve.

After making sure the wireless mouse was off, the touchscreen connector was re-seated. The problem re-appeared after about twenty pipes. After pondering how what we were seeing could possibly happen, we remembered that the pitch wheels were programmed as cursor movers. The pitch wheels were slightly nudged just enough to key up the on-screen cursors. After the wheels were turned to a neutral location, the problem went away.

We arrived on Saturday and put in 8 hours of hosting. We met a large number of enthusiastic attendees and had so many wonderful conversations! Several important contacts were made, and we were visited by Maker Faire staff to check in at least twice.

Small children generally thin out in the afternoon. This means less banging on the keyboard and more accomplished playing. The only time we stop people from banging on the keyboard is if it's endangering the keyboards. People generally never get to touch a pipe organ. They're always off limits and set off in their own space, or hidden behind walls. Getting to create sound out of acoustic pipes, even if it's a bit dissonant, is a special experience that can spark an entire career. Our goal is to demystify the pipe organ, show what's always hidden away behind walls, explain how they work, and most importantly - let people play.

On Sunday, several extremely accomplished players graced our exhibit, and garnered extended and loud applause. I got a chance to walk around the faire and talk to other exhibitors and enjoy the atmosphere. The amateur radio exhibits were great and the food truck lines were slow.

The most time that Organ Donor wasn't being played was perhaps 45 seconds over the two days.

Late Sunday afternoon, we were visited by Rob Burkhead, our event coordinator, who awarded us the Maker Merit blue ribbon! He passed along extremely high praise for our exhibit, efforts, attitude, and effect. Sol Diego and all San Diego burners should be proud. Without your support and encouragement, Organ Donor wouldn't be at the Faire.

Several other large Faire exhibits were from the burner community, and several booths were staffed by burners. Burners volunteered to help run the event, and lots of burners attended.

If you want a wonderful experience where you can share your art directly with appreciative, inquisitive, positive, and interesting people, then give exhibiting at Maker Faire a chance. Non-commercial booths are free. The process is easy. The hardest part is figuring out parking and setup.

Tear-down was easy and Faire and museum staff were entirely supportive and helpful. I can't say enough good things about how the Natural History Museum helps exhibitors. They know it is a big effort to get your art or exhibit set up. They help you solve problems, get things done, and make you feel appreciated. Plus, you're hanging in the same room with a big old dinosaur skeleton.

The organization that puts Maker Faire on is called San Diego Makers Guild. They are in need of volunteers for planning, organizing, recruiting, volunteering, and staffing. Join up at http://www.sdmakersguild.org

There is tremendous continuing potential for rich and varied representation of all San Diego Burners at Maker Faire (as well as STEAM Maker Faire, San Diego County Fair, and many other events up and down the calendar). Performance art, music, LED arts and crafts, fashion, engineering, structural exhibits, fire art, art cars, engineering tricks, magic, improv - it's all welcome.

We are very much looking forward to coming back to Maker Faire with Organ Donor Opus 2!

Rotary Switch Failure

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 19:27:00 +0000

We probably should have anticipated that putting a huge knob on the rotary switch would increase the mechanical stresses on the switch. The switch held up to a few hours of vigorous use by the many children at STEAM Maker Festival, and then started showing signs of failure. At one point I caught it acting as an 11-position rotary switch, instead of the 10-position switch it is supposed to be. The detents still lined up with the panel markings, but some (!) of the functions were offset by one position. Then, the end stop stopped working, leaving the knob free to go all the way around in one direction but not the other. Finally, the switch stopped working entirely, making no connection at any position.

We had to alter the software to ignore the rotary switch and stay in one mode (the keyboard visualization with waterfall effect) for the rest of the event.

Back in the lab, I pulled out the rotary switch for failure analysis. I found two problems, explaining the observed symptoms. The end stop relies on a round sheet metal plate with a tab bent down. That plate was bent, leaving the tab at an angle, so it could ride up over the stop in one direction but not the other. It's easy to see how the plate could get bent when the knob is slammed against the stop. The other problem was that the moving contact that wipes over the ten fixed contacts was broken off. I found the contact loose in the housing.

I speculate that the stop plate bent first. The wiper contact then fell off the end of the fixed contacts into the gap between the first and tenth contact. When the knob was returned to a normal position, the wiper contact had to ride up onto the first or tenth fixed contact, which it was not designed to do. It was able to survive a few such transitions before breaking off.

So, we need to find a more robust rotary switch or else go back to a much smaller knob.

Setup and Configuration at STEAM Maker Festival

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 18:44:00 +0000

Organ Donor Opus 1.2 was set up in record time for the STEAM Maker Festival at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. We had just three hours on Friday and an hour and a half on Saturday morning before the event, for a total of 4.5 hours. The previous record was about 6 hours.

We were able to drive both vehicles right up to the installation site, so very little time was spent carrying parts back and forth. Plus, Richard was there to help.

Over the last few installations, Abraxas has developed a more systematic procedure for placing the air tubes between the wind chest and the pipes. She starts by sorting the tubes by length, and puts the shorter ones in the back. This results in a more orderly arrangement, and less struggle to make all the tubes reach.

Since the last installation, Paul has created a software assistant for configuring the system to match the installation of the tubes. For past installations, we have written the mapping from wind chest to pipes in a notebook, painstakingly checked it over manually for errors, and then manually pressed keys on the manuals to send the programming sequence to the MTP8 MIDI-to-parallel converters in the wind chest. Any error in the latter procedure meant starting over. Now, we press keys on the manuals to tell the software assistant about the mapping. Any duplicate entry is immediately detected and easily corrected. When all the data has been entered, sending the programming sequences to the MTP8s is fully automatic.

The photo shows the screen of the configuration assistant after all the mappings have been entered. I wanted to record the data before doing anything else, just in case there was a problem.

Organ Donor ready to pack up for STEAM Maker Festival

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 07:00:00 +0000

Organ Donor Opus 1 will be exhibited at STEAM Maker Festival at the Del Mar Fairgrounds on Saturday, December 5, 2015. On Thursday night, all the parts are staged to be packed into two vehicles for transport to the fairgrounds and assembly on Friday afternoon. Here's what that looks like.

New knob for the Organelle

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 07:47:00 +0000

The knob we were able to find commercially was just too small and plain, so we designed and 3D-printed a much bolder knob.

The knob design is published on Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1160160

Before the upgrade:

After the upgrade:

Obviously we need to redesign and reprint the panel markings to accommodate this much larger knob.

The knob was designed using OnShape.com, a new (still in beta) parametric 3D CAD system that's free to use with almost no restrictions. Worth checking out.

Software published

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Sat, 10 Oct 2015 09:10:00 +0000

We've caught up on publishing the Organ Donor software to our GitHub project. Not only have we updated the Organelle software to the latest version as of our most recent deployment at the San Diego Maker Faire, but we've also released the Arduino console software for both versions of the Opus 1 console, capturing all the deployed versions back to the beginning.

Organ Donor Richard scores equipment for project!

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 23:58:00 +0000

Thanks to Organ Donor Richard, we now have a spiffy kiosk for future work!

Check out this pdf of the product:

http://a1920.g.akamai.net/f/1920/1078/8h/www.imimages.com/visitor/3m/ChassisTouch.pdf

Richard spotted it on Craigslist, and we earned one of the two kiosks based on the impression given by our website. :+)

Can't wait to fill it with fun interactive features!

Accolade!

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 17:32:00 +0000

This group picked 350 things to honor at Burning Man, and Organ Donor was on the list!

Views from the Balcony

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 16:10:00 +0000

Here are some photos of Organ Donor at the San Diego Maker Faire 2015 in the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park, taken from the balconies above the main show floor. This is an angle we rarely get to see! These were taken on the rainy Sunday morning, when the crowds were thin.

We were asked to keep the aisles clear, so all the long pipes were oriented in the same direction, keeping the layout more compact than usual. This looks a lot like one of our earliest concept drawings of how the pipes would be arranged.

The show floor at the Nat included the luxury of a small cafe, with coffee.

Museums need to have crowd-control stanchions in stock. Here they are keeping people from walking into the long pipes. The railroad track at the lower right is our AC power cord gaffer-taped to the floor. On the small table next to the console you can see the Adafruit UNTZtrument sequencer, connected to one of the four new external MIDI ports on the Organelle.

Here is most of the show floor in the central atrium of the museum, featuring lots of other booths on the zone theme of "Families, Kids, Fun!" This is only a fraction of what was available in the zone (that is, in the Natural History Museum), and it was only one of fourteen zones scattered throughout the park. Organ Donor doesn't look quite so big in this context.

For this deployment we added a 12 foot square patch of padded flooring to our bag of tricks, based on experience with flooring provided for us at the San Diego County Fair. It protects the Museum's floor, but mainly it makes setup and teardown much easier on our knees.

We've also learned a thing or two about getting all this tubing hooked up. Now we sort the tubing by length first, and try to use the shorter tubes at the back of the windchest. This makes for quicker setup and a more orderly result. We set up in record time for this deployment: Friday from 6:30pm to 11pm, and Saturday morning from 8:00am to 9:30am, for a total of about six hours, some of which was spent waiting for the dinosaurs to be moved out of the way.

Great Press from 2015 San Diego Maker Faire

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 18:38:00 +0000

We got some great press! Sol Diego's Organ Donor made the top 10 on Make Magazine for what to see at the 2015 San Diego Maker Faire.

http://makezine.com/2015/10/02/bots-flames-battleships-converge-maker-faire-san-diego/

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Sat, 03 Oct 2015 16:55:00 +0000

Organ Donor is currently showing at Maker Faire at Balboa Park 10am-6pm October 3-4.

http://sdmakerfaire.org

Come see us and dozens of other amazing and inspirational projects!

Organ Donor Successfully Completes Deployment at Burning Man

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Thu, 17 Sep 2015 15:42:00 +0000

Organ Donor successfully completed a deployment at Burning Man 2015 as part of Sol Diego's Wonderlust Arcade installation. The five-day deployment was located with 28 other regional projects under tents at the base of The Man. The “Midway” was open 24 hours a day from event start until 5pm Friday before the burn.

The Wonderlust Midway installation included a forced perspective building and a variety of arcade and midway games and a Zoltar booth. Games were designed and built by members of the Sol Diego team. An article about the forced perspective construction and the games can be found at:

http://www.sdcitybeat.com/sandiego/article-14497-sol-diego-brings-immersive-art-to-burning-man.html

Setup took Organ Donors Paul and Abraxas about 8 hours over two days to complete, including ferrying components and tools out to the Midway (with a 5 mph speed limit). Conditions were windy and dusty, with visibility falling to zero at times. Organ Donor setup had to work with and around all the other teams setting up their art installations.

Substantial changes to the console and software were made from the previous deployment. A new console design was introduced. The minimum desired software functionality was completed on the second day, about an hour before event start. More ambitious software plans, including touchscreen support and graphical user interface features, would have to wait for a later deployment.

The new organ console (version 2.0) improved stability and function. Sturdy legs from IKEA, a cut down IKEA tabletop, and a custom laser-cut cabinet were key elements of the new console, replacing the lightweight folding stage stand and small custom control panel. The console would no longer tip over (or blow away!) as easily, and had improved aesthetics. The two manuals (that is, organ keyboards) and MIDI combiner and coupler management software were carried over from version 1.0 of the console. Version 2.0 added a sheet music stand, an LCD touch-screen, a selector knob, and a laser-engraved diagram to label and explain the stops and coupler buttons. The touch-screen and selector knob were managed by a Raspberry Pi 2 with software written in Python, and the active coupler diagram was managed by an Arduino MEGA 2560.

No substantial changes were made to the pipes, racks, windchest, or blower box. A minor rearrangement of the pipe positions around the rack was necessary to accommodate the shape of the limited space available.

The first failure was with the windchest, which is made of laser-cut acrylic. The front bottom left edge of the windchest leaked during the first pressurization. While the proper solvent-based acrylic cement could be purchased from Reno, that would involve a lengthy trip. Fortunately, Organ Donor Bigun had acrylic cement in his kit. We borrowed a tube, applied the cement, and clamped the windchest closed. This seam held for the duration of the event, possibly because we left the clamps in place. Organ Donor Bigun recommended the addition of a square acrylic rod glued along the seam on the inside of the windchest as a reinforcement. Since the seam is somewhat long, this reinforcement would reduce the amount of flex that probably caused the seam to pop.

The second failure was of both keyboards. When tested after a few hours of dust storm during setup, about half the keys on both manuals were no longer working. We suspected dust fouling the contacts inside the keyboard. With the dust storm continuing and worsening, the keyboards were removed and taken back to Copper Home, Organ Donor's support trailer at Wonderlust Camp. The keyboards were disassembled and inspected. Each key has a series of blue rubber boots that provide domes for each key to press down upon. A contact beneath each dome is actuated when the dome is compressed. Dust had worked its way beneath the rubber boots. The factory design looked more than adequate for normal conditions, but wasn't up to being inundated with playa dust.

A repair was proposed. We would thoroughly clean the contacts and the rubber boots, then use silicone sealant to completely seal the dust boots to the circuit board. The rest of the interior of the keyboard would be allowed to collect dust. Since the rest of the keyboard consisted of mechanical action and the components on the circuit board, confidence was high that the repair would work.

Both dusty keyboards, and the clean pair of backup keyboards, were treated with silicone sealant. In order to replace the dust boots, tool improvisation was required. The rubber plugs that anchor the dust boots would not fit back into the holes by finger pressure. Very small holes were observed at the top of each of the rubber plugs/feet. An unwound paper clip worked perfectly to refit the rubber anchor feet. The strip of dust boots was placed in the correct position, then the paper clip gently pressed into the hole over the top of each plug/foot. The foot then slipped into the hole with no difficulty.

Photos can be found here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/w5nyv/albums/72157658511444682

After the keyboards were treated with sealant, they were returned to the console in the Midway. On the final day, one of the repaired keyboards failed, with just two keys no longer responding to key presses. This was swapped out for one of the backup keyboards. This keyboard worked the rest of the day until close of Midway. The other repaired keyboard lasted the entire event without failures. Later examination showed that we left gaps in the silicone sealant at each of the places where keys failed.

Software functionality for the Midway exhibit consisted of two modes, keyboard and jukebox. Jukebox mode was where Organ Donor played files from the songs directory in the Raspberry Pi. Keyboard mode was where the participant played the keyboard. Participants could play the keyboard at any time, but keyboard mode turned off any MIDI signals being sent to the windchest from the Raspberry Pi.

The Organ Donor received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Conservatory students, amateur musicians, and people that don't have any experience playing a keyboard all were encouraged to play Organ Donor.

One participant, Anthony Decognito, made up songs extemporaneously about other participants. He inquired as to their city of origin, made up a melody, and improvised a song. This was hugely successful.

Several pop-up concerts were held by people that happened to have large amounts of music memorized. The team greatly appreciated the willingness of so many participants that freely shared their talents and training. Crowds gathered in waves to listen and play.

The jukebox mode was freely used. While several lost and found items were recovered, no obvious abuse occurred. While at least one participant used a very unconventional body part to play the keyboard, Organ Donor was unscathed by heavy participant use.

Complete set of photos from the deployment can be found here https://www.flickr.com/photos/w5nyv/albums/72157656113224673

We found that most people didn't really study the coupler diagram, and were generally unwilling to read the verbose text-mode displays on the LCD to understand how to switch between keyboard and jukebox modes. This wasn't entirely surprising, but it did spark some discussion and decisions on how to improve the console for version 3.0.

With some strategic text placement, the coupler diagram could perhaps be improved to the point of not requiring a lot of explanation. During exhibition, it did not take much additional explanation to make the coupler diagram come alive, but the fact that it did take some additional explanation at all means there is room for improvement in this particular interface. Plans are in place to improve this particular interface for San Diego Maker Faire (3-4 October 2015).

For the LCD screen that showed status and gave instructions for jukebox vs. keyboard mode, it was felt that a big image on the screen and callouts on the knob would improve ease of operation.

Upon return to San Diego, the blower box, windchest, and pipes were cleaned with compressed air and damp cloths, and Organ Donor was set up for San Diego Maker Faire improvements.

Anyone interested in the project is welcome to follow along and is invited to consider becoming an Organ Donor. The project needs skills of all types, including machine learning, coding, user interface design, game theory, carpentry, laser cutting, 2D and 3D modeling, 3D printing, and many other areas. Contact Abraxas or Paul by sending a message through this site.

Kickstarter that helps Organ Donor

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 22:37:00 +0000

Do you like Organ Donor?

Did you know that Organ Donor will be at Burning Man this year?

Did you know that you can help?

This project is hosting our machine learning pipe organ. If you donate to it, you are helping Organ Donor.

Please consider donating. Leave a note in the comments that you're an Organ Donor supporter. *Any* amount helps.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/soldiego/wonderlust-arcades-trip-to-burning-man?ref=card

Organ Donor Project Overview

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Sun, 21 Jun 2015 17:25:00 +0000

High Tech High Meetup Playlist

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 14:53:00 +0000

Organ Donor is going to be presented at the Maker Faire meetup at High Tech High on 20 June. Here's the playlist for our 5 minute window :+)

Digging Into Questions About Entropy

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 15:29:00 +0000

Here's a graph that represents two things. First, a lot of work completed. Second, a lot of work that needs to be done!

These three curves are the bits of entropy per sliding window location in a work by Buxtehude (Prelude and Fugue in G Minor). The width of the window is set by the Kemeny constant of the MIDI track. There are three tracks: Swell, Great, and Pedal.

On a pipe organ, the main manual (keyboard) is called the Great. It is usually the bottom manual on two-manual instruments, or the middle manual on three-manual instruments. The upper manual is called the Swell. The Pedal is usually the very lowest notes in the piece. This is often played with the feet on the pedalboard.

Each of these tracks represents the music that would be played on the corresponding part of the instrument. Each part can be voiced on a completely separate rank of pipes, creating a layered sound.

In the MIDI version, each of the tracks is examined mathematically. First, a Markov chain is derived. This is a table that shows how likely it is for any particular note to follow a particular note. Starting with the first note and going all the way to the end, all combinations of the notes that follow the previous note are recorded, and then the probabilities calculated.

Next, the Kemeny Constant is found. This is the number of steps from a starting note to a randomly selected note chosen from the Markov chain's stationary distribution. No matter which starting note is selected from the piece, it takes about the same amount of steps to reach the randomly selected note from the piece. This number of steps is the width of our sliding window. The window function slides over the track. For each window, the entropy of the windowed sample is measured.

What we're looking for is places where the entropy changes dramatically. This would potentially indicate a local change in the entropy of the piece, which may indicate a compositional change or transition in the work. Identifying macro-phrases like this may be helpful in constructing algorithmic compositions that better emulate human composition.

As you can tell from the graph, the tracks do not line up. The pedal track is much shorter than the great, which is shorter than the swell. Therefore, the number of windows evaluated is not the same across the three tracks. This means that the samples are not aligned in time if they are simply listed along the horizontal axis. The samples need to be normalized for observed time. This (using the timestamps in the MIDI file to align the samples) is the next task in the design of this part of the software.

Organ Donor at San Diego County Fair - Day 2

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 02:27:00 +0000

We spent part of the day demonstrating and maintaining Organ Donor Opus 1 at the San Diego County Fair today.

We arrived to find a blown fuse! We replaced it and got Opus 1 back up and running at full capacity. The blown fuse took out one of the two controllers, so only half the pipes were playing. However, with all the settings usually selected, plenty of notes were filling in the sound.

We measured the console to make Version Two, which will include updated controls and a screen. The screen-equipped console is dubbed The Organelle. We're 3D printing the escutcheon and backplate for the screen over the next few days.

We disinfected the keys with clorox wipes and checked to make sure all the tubing was still in place.

More Fair next week! The Fair is closed Monday and Tuesday, but opens back up on Wednesday.

People love the organ, enjoy playing it, and some are actually studying the posters. See the Documents page for the current set of posters!

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 16:36:00 +0000

Check out our pipe construction poster that we made for our exhibit at the 2015 San Diego County Fair!

http://www.sol-diego.org/Documents/OrganDonorPipeConstructionPoster.pdf

Organ Donor Goes to the Fair and Finds it's Fantastic

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Sun, 31 May 2015 16:19:00 +0000

The San Diego County Fair runs from 5 June – 5 July 2015, and is expected to draw nearly a million and a half visitors. Like Burning Man, the fair represents drastically different things to different people. Unlike Burning Man, it’s very commercial, very spectator-friendly, and while it may flirt with a PG rating, it’s almost entirely kid-friendly and carefully curated.

However, there are some surprising commonalities between Burning Man and The Fair. There are some excellent untapped opportunities for Burners to participate in The Fair, greatly increase our presence in the wider community, and substantially improve our art projects along the way.

The fair is a fabric that supports diverse experience. The rides are provided for people to play on. The music is performed for people to enjoy. The demonstration gardens are planted for people to browse. The food is plentiful for people to buy. The contests are organized for people to compete.

You can spend the entire day studying woodworking, gems, art, photography, yearbooks, and school projects. There are workshops and demonstrations in all of these areas. Or, you can spend the entire day riding carnival rides and eating. These two paths would only cross at the bathroom.

The Fair aims to submerse you in whatever captures your attention. The Fair wants to subvert you from a spectator to an active and engaged participant. Preferably leading with your wallet, of course, but not necessarily. Organ Donor has found that The Fair really, really, really wants exhibitors, not just more customers. This is a huge opportunity for Sol Diego, and therefore all San Diego Burners.

Burning Man art projects are an excellent fit for The Fair. The Fair has facilities large enough to show off the biggest art cars. There is a car show at the Fair every year, right at the entrance, with fleets of cars that rotate daily through all sorts of car clubs. Why not a burner art car day at The Fair?

The Creative Youth Tent in the midfield is an enormous space. This year, 15,000 pieces of art will be displayed. These are pieces made by children. This is where Organ Donor will be playable from 5 June – 5 July. Imagine more interactive indoor style Burner exhibits in this space!

There are huge swathes of open space that could very well host large constructed projects, LED-art, fire art, or whatever we came up with. Performance pieces, games, puzzles, the list is literally endless. Any ideas that are “too late, too big, too hard” for 2015 Burning Man Midway could find an almost perfect fit in a real Midway at The Fair.

Participation in The Fair requires completion and installation months ahead of the typical Burner build rush in July and August. This requires a team to have their act together, logistics-wise, much earlier in the year. The benefits, however, are substantial.

First, the potential for publicity and recruiting is enormous. Imagine demonstrating a working project and being able to invite people to join Sol Diego.

Second, the ability to test-drive a new interactive art project with real people over a long period of time will provide the sort of feedback that you don’t want to wait for the playa to get. Imagine being able to include a fantastic new feature or shape or structure that simply wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise, without people actually encountering your artwork in the wild. Since The Fair closes after the 4^th of July, you would have July and August to upgrade or modify your project to make it substantially better for the Burn.

The schedule does have a downside. I mentioned already that Organ Donor wasn’t able to come to Figment this year because of the conflict between The Fair and Figment. While we might have been able to take Organ Donor down and moved to Figment, the odds of being able to easily get back in to The Fair to set back up were very long. They want exhibits to be completely ready to go, and stay as long as possible. Setting up Organ Donor is a long and messy process, so we chose to stay for the entire length of The Fair. This doesn’t have to be the case for a project that is smaller or easier to set up.

Brandie envisioned Sol Diego becoming something like the Flaming Lotus Girls, with their projects being installed as large, recognized, funded, public art works in and around the city of San Francisco. I don’t have any insight or connections with the city of San Diego, outside of the ones I have accidentally made from time to time, but my feeling is that we should probably follow the path of least resistance and go where we are wanted, first.

If, as Brandie described, the San Diego city public art people are hostile to burners or have already decided we’re just a bunch of flakes, or honestly think that community driven art is fundamentally lesser quality than their sculptures of awkwardly posed surfers, then so be it. We have paths available to us that lead not only to the playa, but also to the fairgrounds, Balboa Park, and friendly museum spaces. Following these paths and showing that we are not flakes and that our art is not of lesser quality, while having a total blast and making people happy, sounds like having our cake and eating it too.

What’s required to do this successfully? Planning. Financial support. Communications. Following through. Starting now to draw up ideas and fundraising for the efforts. It means we stop waiting for Burning Man org to get around to eventually telling us what they think we should do, and start picking our projects for ourselves, showing them to San Diego, and then taking them to The Burn.

Looking forward to 2016, I’d like to know how interested we are in recruiting, sponsoring, building, showing, and supporting burner art in community spaces like The Fair and Balboa Park?

Organ Donor at the San Diego County Fair 5 June - 5 July 2015

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Thu, 28 May 2015 16:07:00 +0000

What is a chord?

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Sat, 23 May 2015 23:14:00 +0000

We've been working hard on the math that is underneath the surface of Organ Donor behavior. We're now beginning to grapple with pitches, or notes, instead of just pitch classes. A pitch class in western classical music is the name of one of the 12 semitones on the scale (C, F, G, etc).

A pitch also includes the octave or register (C4, F6, G2, etc)

So, up until now we've been working with 12-element vectors, where each position stands for a pitch class. A triad would be something like this:

[1,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,0,0,0]

The 1's indicate the presence of a note at that semitone. There are 12 semitones, and three of them are played.

But this doesn't tell you which octave the pitches are in.

With a small change, this information can be recorded in the vector.

[1,0,0,0,2,0,0,3,0,0,0,0]

Here, the first note of the triad (at semitone position 0) is in the first octave. The second note of the triad (at semitone position 4) is in the second octave. The third note of the triad (at semitone position 7) is in the third octave.

Now, when handling this vector, I can make a list of which octaves the pitches are in. When I rearrange or invert the chord, I can make sure that the octave information survives.

Some transformations we don't yet have a method for preserving the information. For example, when getting the prime form of a chord, we are really calculating what class the chord falls into. The registration of the notes in the chords doesn't matter because prime form encompasses many variations of registration. Going from prime form to vectors means that when you generate the vectors, you are generating lists of pitch-class representations (the vector has all 1's), but not pitch representations (the vector has many numbers).

Something that occurred to us is that using 1's for generic presence of a pitch class gets confusing if you also take 1 to mean that it's from the lowest octave. This will be fixed, but we're not yet sure what the very best and most clever way forward is!

-Abraxas3d

And Another Software Repository on GitHub

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Tue, 19 May 2015 17:20:00 +0000

Greetings all! Here is the GitHub software repository for the user interface code for Organ Donor:

https://github.com/OrganDonor/Organelle

This is the code that runs on the "Organelle", which will be the console from which functions and basic operations can be controlled.

This is distinct from the console code, which is the code that makes sure that all the manuals (keyboards) are properly integrated into a single MIDI stream, and makes sure that not too many keys are pressed at once (which would pull too much current and pop a fuse).

Software Repository for Organ Donor

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Sat, 16 May 2015 03:14:00 +0000

Software repository launched on github!

https://github.com/OrganDonor

Cipher Solver - Opus 1 Repairs

abraxas@sand.net (Abraxas3D) — Mon, 04 May 2015 23:57:00 +0000

Cipher work on Opus 1 began today! Here's the tracking document: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D6tU0KzxBT_n2KRq9RMQf1lhDpYGrcdHnSOyFiDY33A/edit?usp=sharing

With this many valves needing replacement, the question was to make a new windchest or renovate the existing windchest?

The windchest was designed for the older style Petersen valves. However, the older Petersens and the new Petersens have different screw points. Also, the new Petersens have a claw that is supposed to grip into wood. Because we have an acrylic top, this claw can’t dig in to the material and therefore it prevents the valve from sitting flat on the acrylic. The solution we came up with during initial construction was to make an adapter plate. These adapter plates relocated the screw hole, lifted up the valve so the claw did not impact the surface, and sealed the old screw hole.

We decided to replace three entire rows of the old Petersens with new Petersens. We decided this for two reasons. Almost all the ciphers were on old Petersens that had pads that were much larger than the hole. The ideal pad size in only 0.25 of an inch larger than the hole. This creates higher effective pressure on the valve, which helps to prevent leaks. This strategy required taking out the old Petersens, making adapter plates for these valves, putting in the adapter plates, then putting in the new Petersens.

During initial research, it was misunderstood that the pad size needed to be at least 0.25 larger than the hole. It seemed like the larger the pad the better, however this did not turn out to be the case. The margin needs to be as close to an eighth of an inch all around in order to have the best seal.