SoundAffects launched this summer – a ten-day audio experiment that listens to more than just the noise of a New York City street corner. A wall on the corner of 5th Avenue and 13th Street collected data input including temperature readings, color analysis of video feeds, precipitation measurements, noise levels, cellular activity/interference, and proximity sensors, all of which was fed into the SoundAffects generative music algorithm and visualizer system (composed, designed and engineered by Tellart).

The project is the second collaboration of Tellart and mono (concept creation) following up the award-winning Real Good Chair Experiment. This time the client was Parsons The New School for Design, and the goal was to encourage engagement with the city environment.

The music, and the corresponding visuals and video, are available in near real-time through the browser or on your phone. The composition is navigable using the timeline, which is marked with the “experiments” scheduled throughout the week.

The project was completed using HTML5, JavaScript, Max/MSP/Jitter, Ableton Live, and various other software tools. On the hardware side, Tellart rigged industrial sensors to an Arduino micro-controller and captured live video throughout the ten days.

Diagram explaining the inputs and their visualizer color mappings (courtesy of mono).

The view from behind the SoundAffects wall.

Jasper experiments with the sensors to hear their affect on the music.

The SoundAffects wall is on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 13th Street.

SoundAffects: Behind the Scenes from Tellart on Vimeo.

In celebration of Valentine’s Day, Tellart is launching the Love Song Machine, a musical instrument controlled (by you) through the internet. Visitors to the website can select a song or compose their own, and press play to send the song to the instrument in our Providence office.

The bells are played by a series of solenoids, which are controlled by an Arduino micro-controller. The notes that you submit are processed on our web servers and then sent to the Arduino, while we load up live video and audio so that you can watch your song play. If there are users ahead of you in line, the queuing system will let you know how long you’ve got before you can watch your song.

The bell machine will only be available for a limited time, so start composing!

We recently had the privilege to collaborate with Providence artist Dave Cole on a piece for his recent show at the Dodge Gallery in New York City. After hearing Dave’s plans to create an antique, morse-code generating machine that would continuously tap (and blink) the Pledge of Allegiance, Adam volunteered to give him a hand with implementation.

They found a few parts online that would help bring Dave’s idea to fruition, and used this online morse code translator to translate the Pledge of Allegiance into morse code.  The dots and dashes became individual functions in the Arduino code that would control the antique morse code machine. The final machine — made up of a transistor, a solenoid, a lamp switch, and the antique parts and lightbulb — was then able to repeatedly tap the message, and blink the light on and off with every “beep”.

The work, titled Vox(Pledge of Allegiance) was on view at the Dodge Gallery from October 2 to November 7, 2010.

IMAGE: Dave Cole, Vox (Pledge of Allegiance), 2010, mixed media with vintage telegraph station, incandescent light bulb, and morse code transmission (Pledge of Allegiance), variable x 21 x 15 inches

A few weeks ago Matt and Timo Arnall taught a 5-day workshop for interaction designers on stop motion animation techniques as part of the Experience Prototyping Course at the Umea Institute of Design. Matt and Timo covered media topics such as fundamental photographic principles, cinematography, and animation; all techniques that allow designers to explore and communicate ideas in a new and creative format. The resulting films from the course were great and we look forward to following these students as they progress through the program.

To see more work from our past courses at Umea (we’ve have been teaching there since 2005) check out these links:
http://tellart.com/work.php#-ume
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattcottam/sets/72157622626899826/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattcottam/sets/72157623888836678/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattcottam/sets/72157622628292643/

We are proud to announce the launch of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra AR Experiment! This is Tellart’s addition to Google’s already excellent YouTube Symphony Orchestra, a project dedicated to gathering musicians from around the world for a monumental orchestral performance — something only Google’s technology and reach could do.

Google came to Tellart in search of something to augment the YTSO online experience; they were looking for an online musical instrument that could be enjoyable for non-musicians, but complex enough to engage more advanced users.

Between work on our earlier musical holiday card and our ongoing interests in physical/digital play, we had just the right background and team to jump in and create (a few digital music gurus in-house didn’t hurt, either). As it’s reaching a global audience (the site is translatable into 21 languages), we tried to make it as accessible and intuitive as possible.

It is built with open-source tools alongside Tellart’s contributions (see the site for more details) — we hope you enjoy!

Last week, Matt spoke at Quantified Self Amsterdam, an international, syndicated conference based around Kevin Kelly’s vision – “a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in self knowledge through self-tracking.” With our experience working with both existing and in-house developed physical computing tools to sense human gestures and biometrics, we felt right at home. Matt spoke about Tellart projects, and work with students, that imagine near future concepts for interactive products and services that allow people to collect and “see” their behaviours and personal data in new ways.

A few good examples are our prototypes with Humana, who we partner with regularly to create projects that range from health games for kids, to office games for health, to activities for the elderly.

It’s always sad to say goodbye to Summer and with it our Summer interns. This month Laila Aukee and Peter Simon, our most recent alumni, returned to their studies at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Laila and Peter were students in our Design for Ubiquitous Computing course in the RISD Department of Industrial Design last fall and followed on with excellent projects at Tellart this Summer. Most of Tellart’s team have graduated from either RISD or Brown University (not a rule), and we take pride in the incredible culture we have built – Laila and Peter were perfect additions and we wish them the best of luck in their final year of school.

Last week marked the conclusion of an action packed year at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) where we had the privilege of teaching several courses and workshops. Having been a big part of this year’s graduating class, Matt was invited to serve as Chairman of the Board of Examiners for Final Projects; the board of examiners included Golan Levy from Carnegie Mellon and Mike Albers from the BBC. Twenty students demonstrated their incredible creativity, skill, and talent over the course of the three days of presentations and critiques.

Matt has been a visiting faculty member at CIID’s Interaction Design Program since their Pilot year, and this year spent thirty days teaching there with the fine full-timers at CIID, as well as our Director of Technology Brian Hinch, and Tellart’s good friends: Frog Design’s Fabio Sergio, Jack Schulze of BERG, and Timo Arnall. Topics of the courses included: Analog Introduction to IxD; Mobile Hacking, Design and Prototyping; Design Fiction and Filmmaking for Designers; and Designing Ecosystems. Matt and Timo mentored final projects, and Tellart also taught a one week Summer School course with Maia Garau on Intro to IxD and Service Design.

During the first week of classes students created 24×24 sticky note icon dyptichs: To friend, and to unfriend.

Martina Pagura’s final project tracking the ingredients of recipes in the kitchen with computer vision.

The excellent head of school Simona Maschi during the final examinations

Vinay Venkatraman, Golan Levy and David Gauthier tallying the results of the exams

Ishac Bertran’s amazing stop motion animation device for children won the Honors Prize

Gizem Boyacioglu made a tactile interactive game for the vision impaired and their friends

Ubiquitous computing project asked students to match sensors, users and contexts to invent new product/service ecosystems

Students presenting their information architecture projects during the Analog Intro to IxD course

The Tellart classic project “What is a switch” explores tangible user interfaces

During the Analog Intro to IxD course students quickly sketch-modeled mobile collaborative interactions between different handset types

During the Analog Intro to IxD course students quickly sketch-modeled mobile collaborative interactions between different handset types

Students during the first week of classes

iPhone/Pod hacking with Brian Hinch from Tellart: mobile tools for the Port-au-Prince hurricane disaster

Timo mentoring Pedro during the early weeks of his final project

Information exercise from the Summer School: Mapping relationships within social networks in 3d

Information exercise from the Summer School: Mapping relationships within social networks in 3d

Additional photos from the program can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1235824@N23/pool/with/4961674709/

Homepage project by Mayo Nissen.

After last year’s Maker Pong fun in downtown Providence, we were psyched to get involved with this year’s Maker Faire– a yearly event designed to celebrate New England D.I.Y. culture. We decided to stick to the theme of mixed reality projection games, developing a custom WaterFire tribute to the classic Frogger Game. Players were invited to wear a helmet rigged with infrared LED’s which let them control a virtual frog trying to cross the treacherous WaterFire-themed street.

In the spirit of this Make Magazine-affiliated event, we are sharing our software that ran the game, along with some instructions – available for download here.

The 6th International Fab Lab Conference was held from August 15-20 in the Netherlands. Tellart’s Matt Cottam, along with the Waag Society’s Bas van Abel, ran a daylong workshop around the [UN]LIMITED Design Contest. The competition is sponsored by Etsy.com, The Waag Society, Premslea and Creative Commons, and aims to promote Open Design (Open Source product design). The workshop encouraged participants to deconstruct and re-imagine Open Designs from last year’s competition, develop new derivative designs, and prototype them in the Waag Society’s Fab Lab in one day. Matt will also be a juror for the competition at the PICNIC conference in Amsterdam this September. Also at PICNIC, Matt will give an O’Reilly Ignite talk as well as a talk in Adam Greenfield’s session on Urban Lenses.

Tellart’s R&D lab has found a new home in San Francisco, CA – on the 19th floor of the Central Tower, with a great view of the city, and more space for piles of electronics! Although we were sad to leave the Beaux-Arts grandeur of the Flood Building, the Central Tower makes up for it with it’s own Art Deco flair. A little building trivia: until 1937, the building (then known as the Call Building) was only 15 stories tall, with an additional four stories in a Baroque dome at the top. The nineteenth floor (our residence) was the very top of the dome that provided access to the Call Lantern until 1937 when the dome was demolished to add more floors.

If you’re in the neighborhood, don’t hesitate to stop by!

Last week Jasper was invited to talk at the 5th annual Sketching in Hardware Conference in Los Angeles. The summit, on the design and use of physical computing toolkits, is one of our favorites – Tellart helped to craft it in 2005, and it is always an honor to be invited to participate.

Jasper’s talk was titled “Economies of fail: values and choices in sketching”. He discussed the value of sketching, and proposed that improved sketching resources should prompt us to generate a greater volume of hardware sketches, rather than more sophisticated sketches. Greater volume can lead to stronger ideas – a more valuable goal than prototypes with a higher degree of sophistication.

The talks should be online soon, and we’ll be sure to post Jasper’s here.

photo: Bleeker

photo: Bleeker

A few weeks ago we celebrated our ten year anniversary in true Tellart fashion. We decked out the space downstairs (thanks to Clay Rockefeller for letting us use it) with projectors, DJ equipment, lights, and analog/digital “drawing zones”. The celebration started in our office with delicious hors d’oeuvres and beverages catered by Dave Hernandez, then continued downstairs for dancing and mingling. It was complete with inspiring speeches by our leaders, DJ’ing by our co-workers, and homegrown interactive ambient displays.

Thanks to everyone who showed up and who has supported us throughout our first ten years! If you missed it, we hope to see you at the twenty year celebration.

We are excited to hear that the Real Good Chair Experiment for BluDot (a collaboration between Mono, Supermarche, and Tellart) won a Cannes Lions Bronze award at this years 57th International Advertising Festival – the award recognizes the project as one of the best “interactive digital solutions” of 2009. Mono led the concept and creative; Supermarche produced the resulting film; and Tellart was responsible for technology strategy and implementation (the devices, the website, and the tracking).  We loved the concept, the film, and the chairs – all in all we had a great time working on the project, and we are thrilled the experiment is getting some good attention!

A roadtrip caravan transporting a Fab lab from Amsterdam to Berlin, a panel discussion, a workshop, a talk, and lots of making…

Early Wednesday morning Matt met up with Bas van Abel (Waag Society), Mike Pelletier (Waag Society Fab Lab) and Gianfranco Chicco (PICNIC) for the six hour drive from Amsterdam to Berlin. The night before, other Waag Society teammates drove a truck filled with the entire Waag Fab Lab to the now defunct Templehof Airport in Berlin. By early Thursday morning the Maker Lab area of the festival was a hive of activity.

Event website:

http://dmy-berlin.com/

The annual DMY Festival exhibits the work of more than 400 designers and is extended by over 40 satellite events around Berlin. This year the event hosted an international group of designer-hackers who brought in a factory’s worth of machinery to set up a Maker Lab. CNC milling, laser cutting, thermal forming, bioplastic molding, physical computing with Arduino, custom circuit board design and etching with Fritzing, RepRap and MakerBot 3-d printing, stop-motion animation and just about every other means of prototyping was in house. Matt was one of a team of volunteer experts that worked with the visiting public to rapidly design and build (or Fab(ricate)) their product ideas on the spot.

On Friday morning Matt ran the Form Workshop in the lab where participants hacked existing clothing (i.e. Tellart’s pet project involving the use of a laser cutter to turn flip flops into stamps by cutting patterns in their soles), and made custom fashions of their own design.

Friday afternoon was the Open Design Panel Discussion where Matt and a group of other Open Design thought leaders shared ideas on the emerging methodology and on Saturday Matt gave a talk in the Symposium event.

On Sunday Matt was an invited participant in a collaborative Unlimited Design (open design) book writing session. The group will publish the first Open Design manifesto for announcement at PICNIC in Amsterdam this September.

Check out Matt’s Flickr sets here:

Maker Lab

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattcottam/sets/72157624151719223/

(Un)limited Design Book Workshop

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattcottam/sets/72157624151487773/