Wanderers is a geo-spatial sound walk app designed as a companion to the Colorado Scale Model Solar System (CSMSS). It was designed by Teri Rueb (director), Roberto Azaretto (sound design and composition) and myself (audio programming and app design).

The app runs real-time interactive sound synthesis in Pure Data (Pd). The sounds change based on your location in the CSMSS and your app settings (orbit rate, hearing range, heading).

Sound is spatialized according to your location and heading - headphones highly recommended!

Fiske

News

Completed in October 2021, Galaga’s Ghost is a 6-player musical arcade machine, and a dance party waiting to happen. Come to the Museum of Boulder between now and January 2022 for your chance to play! This was created as a collaboration with Boulder Experiments in Art and Technology (B.E.A.T.) and the Museum of Boulder for Convivial Machines.

Collaboration with: Sean Winters, Chase Stewart, Spencer Arrasmith, Eric Atencio, Torin Hopkins, and Marc Seyfirth.

River Constellation, Water Works Park in Des Moines, IA , Fall 2019.

I developed the audio system for this permanent site-Responsive, multi-media public sculpture

Artists: Natalia Zubko (sculpture) and Beau Kenyon (Musical composition)

Lighting design: Dispersion

Fabrication: JunoWorks

An Interactive Sound / Visual Art Piece in the dual exhibit, Kinetic Iterations

Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, Summer 2018

In 2019 I started Boulder Experiments in Art and Technology to foster creativity and collaboration at the intersection of art and technology. We meet to share ideas and new projects. We are excited to be presenting a show at the Museum of Boulder opening October 29, 2021.

Learn more at the meetup page: http://bit.ly/B_E_A_T

Interactive Sound Installation

Museum of Boulder, Summer 2018

Sound reactive lamp. 240 color addressable LEDs, electret microphone, arduino, lamp.

Lights Out (2018), RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Denver, CO

eTown (2018), Dia De Los Muertos Celebration, Boulder, CO

Maker Made (2018), Canyon Gallery, Boulder, CO

Co(i)nspire (2017), Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder, CO

I love lamp.

Museum of Boulder | August / September 2018, Artist and Project Coordinator

Designed and fabricated listening stations and DJ recording booth & curator

Solarophone is an interactive sound art installation.  It was installed in the conoid at the main Boulder Public Library in March 2016 – June 2016.

beatBox - is a light controlled mechanical drum machine. It is played by casting shadows over a series of light sensors. This feeds into an algorithmic drum beat that triggers small motors to tap on different objects inside the box. Two sliders allow control over the tempo and the swing feel of the drum machine by delaying every other beat.

The pattern on top, which surrounds the light sensitive resistors, is laser etched generative visuals created using code in Processing.

Project by artist Michael Theodore.

I wrote the software that controlled the installation. The setup included 55 nodes with a microcontroller and servo motor each. Messages were passed to neighbors to enable emergent behaviors.

Hardware platform by Nikolaus Correll, Correll lab at CU Boulder.

Publications:

endo/exo Making Art and Music with Distributed Computing, NIME 2014

SolidNoise is a robotic music ensemble that explores new techniques to make music by triggering a variety of motors to produce sound by physically striking, shaking, tapping or blowing on different physical objects, including the architecture of the space itself.

The ensemble was created using custom hardware and software to enable controlling motors using the MIDI standard.

SolidNoise was originally presented in the ATLAS Black Box theater for an evening of original compositions created for the ensemble. The ensemble also performed at the 2016 Guthman Musical Instrument competition. 

Publications:

SolidNoise: Tools for Making Musical Robots, demo CHI 2016

SolidNoise: Making Musical Robots, CHI 2016

Guthman New Musical Instrument Competition 2016, 2017

Unreleased iOS app. Record tracks, then wreck ‘em

Modular Muse was developed as part of my PhD work at the ATLAS Institute which includes two platforms that can be used to develop musical robots / instruments and mapping tangible interfaces to sound:

The musical robots (instrument building) platform consists of MIDI controlled Motor Driver boards and associated laser cut mechanisms. Example projects which utilize this platform include Solidnoise, beatBox, Aesthetic Algorithms, and projects by others including a tactile interface, thermochromic display (shown below)

Sound Clippys is an instrument building platform that makes it easy to build tangible interfaces and a software library for mapping interfaces to sound. These were used in workshops and in a middle school music classroom where children designed and built their own instruments (see eCSite example video).  

Please see www.modularmuse.com for more info and to order hardware.

Feedback Lap Steel guitar with active string technology. The instrument has a transducer built into the bridge so that energy can be put directly into the strings. This enables infinite sustain with controlled feedback and the injection of other sounds and rhythms by a computer while it can still be played as a traditional lap steel guitar.

Initially designed & fabricated at Stanford University, 2012. I built a control box and presented at NIME in 2015.

Performance piece. CCRMA 2012.

Banjo + laptop

Software written in Chuck.

Here the banjo turns into a computer interface to control a musical system that takes real time samples from the instrument, remixes them and responds with its own interpretation. The computer will play on and on as long as the banjo keeps playing.