Tuesday April 29th

The tuners are in the right position now, and I think I’m ready to wire up the electronics next. The end board where the strings terminate is already buckling a little and I haven’t used a lot of tension yet, will need to add another board there at the end! It sounds pretty goofy unamplified with random banjo and acoustic strings I had laying around. It’ll be fun to find out how the four pickups and exciter/string feedback will sound when the electronics are all wired up.

Monday April 28th

The tuners arrived! They needed a little shim piece to fit on the end board, but they’re on there snugly now.

Edit: if you play guitar or have built one you may have noticed I installed the tuners in such a way that the strings won’t wind around them properly… lol. I guess I was thinking I could just wrap them somehow, but I wasn’t really thinking. It’s salvageable though! Slotting the tuner piece into the top seems to work.

Sunday April 27th

This is a sketch for a balsa feedback resonator. The cylinder thing is meant to be an exciter attached to a piece of thick paper/cardboard, sitting on top of four balsa struts attached to the inner corners of the resonator. Above the cardboard membrane is a (balsa? pcb?) bridge to hold some great little pickups J found recently. Three pickups, one for each string pulled across the top of the resonator, attached to three locking tuners embedded into one side. The pickups connect to an amp… probably off to the side, but there might be room underneath. The amp powers the exciter, and hopefully there’s room in the bottom for three unamplified line outs from the pickups…

I got tired of making shapes in solidpython2 (tho it is great!) but I was thinking whatever kind of board the pickups are attached to could be sitting on balsa rails, supported with more corner shims maybe. If it was left floating, and the wires were loose enough, it could be repositioned closer and further from the speaker by sliding it back and forth. The strings would thread on one side just through some small holes in the wood, and on the other into tuners mounted on the side.

Maybe a little side attachment box for electronics to hold the amp etc?

Saturday April 26th

I’m essentially done with this rather large and presumptuous set of changes to astrid’s inter-process communication plumbing. Four months in the making, I guess? I lost track. There’s at least still some issue with trigger generation, and I’m surprised my shared memory pickling hack seems to be working, but the new IPC lifecycle interfaces are chugging along pretty well so far. What’s really exciting is this makes a lot of tricky things pretty easy, and while I’m sure more bugs lurk beneath the changes it will give python instruments a very flexible way to build shared sampling systems, custom message passing and instrumentalized processes based around state races, shared mutated states of all sorts…

I plan to work on adapting the get interface to be a faster path for resources whose values are small enough to be stored directly in the LMDB header – allowing them to be read without acquiring locks, look ma! – at the moment it just wraps the acquire/release interfaces which always use locks.

I’m possibly doing a kind of meditation zone / installation thing in the park here in Winona for this year’s pride, so I’m pretty glad astrid is making sound again. :-) My cousins are hopefully joining in as well, and I think it’ll be a chance to try out the resonator trees somewhere besides across from the kitchen in my apartment.

Edit: well, yup! There is certainly something fishy with the pickling IPC shenanegans. It’s probably best to do it properly and make a serializer for each type – there aren’t that many required, really.

Happy astrid is making sound again tho. :-D

Tuesday April 1st

I can’t read the German, but I love the layout and illustrations in this zine produced by patients at the Charite Berlin Mitte psychiatric clinic.