Kickstarter that helps Organ Donor

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

High Tech High Meetup Playlist

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

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

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!

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

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?