Fashioning Circuits

A concept I’d been kicking around for a while is the dynamics of something like music performance and audience response. Getting a sense of what a crowd responds to or is into might influence the alteration of a set on a micro- or macroscopic level. There’s a few vectors of hardware and interaction I’d like to get at (I’ve been eyeing community drivers for the Kinect for a long time to look at crowds en masse), but when focusing more directly on wearable media I wanted to dig more deeply into movement as an expressive response to media, and ways to increase reciprocity with what inspired said movement.

Given its ability to act as a USB HID device, I went with Adafruit’s FLORA as my microcontroller.  It was my hope that this would allow me to not need a back end on any computer, and could just program the microcontroller to put out the MIDI that I wanted to express based on whatever sensory input. It wasn’t until after I’d received my FLORA and began digging for code that I noticed the complete lack of available information on any such project with that particular microcontroller. I was hard-pressed to find any example code at all of MIDI HID on the Arduino platform in general, and that which I did find seemed to be relatively inapplicable.I’d like to take the time to research and contribute to such a library for the FLORA, but that was outside of the scope of the project.

For sensory input, I’ve so far settled upon using Adafruit’s complementary FLORA accelerometer. After some flirtations with trying to get Firmata mode set up with the Node.js library Johnny-Five, my limited low-level experience made trying to interpret the i2c signals coming from the accelerometer also outside the project’s scope. I opted instead to use Adafruit’s provided library for the accelerometer and format it for easy digestion by node-serialport. At this point, the FLORA is simply kicking out accelerometer data along the three axes as a single line that the Node.js back-end interprets as a stream. This stream parses out that serial text into numeric values, which I can then scale up and interpret.

Currently the output vector for this is the coremidi module, allowing me to push interpreted accelerometer data to MIDI in OS X. I am still exploring the best ways to scale and manipulate data, and then how to have it affect music. Having the accelerometer output tied to something like the modwheel would make sense for altering the sound but not having to worry about particular notes or timing (none of the Node.js MIDI libraries I could find had clock functionality built in; quantizing would have to happen inside of whatever music software). The practically hard part of creating a motion input has been completed, but the manipulation of that input and in what was to necessarily output it is not something I’ve entirely settled upon. I will be making the source code public in the near future for the project as it exists now.

I’ve purchased and will be adhering a Sparkfun BlueSMIRF Silver Bluetooth  adapter (Adafruit has insisted a sewable module of their own is coming) to push the serial data wirelessly to a computer in order to get rid of a physical cable and to open up the possibility that there can be more than one of these devices in play at once. It would be incredibly fun to get a dancefloor full of people wired up with these sensors, and to crunch data about their physical response to music that will then influence how the music ends up getting expressed. Unfortunately, this seems very cost-ineffective at this time. Using a full-size FLORA, accelerometer, Bluetooth module and coin battery-based power supply puts material costs well above what seems practical or viable to do with any sort of scale. The cost also kept me from embedding or folding the hardware into any sort of more elaborate or particular clothing for fear of making it too specific; a wristband was as simple an item of clothing I could imagine.

As it stands, this either serves as a neat proof of concept for the dynamic I was seeking to explore, or it’s something that I as a producer of music can wear while either recording or performing that will allow another facet of control and expression that responds to my physical body. I’m still excited about this idea, but it ends up feeling less novel to me. The goal for this concept in the future will be how to play with the movement or expressions of a crowd without having to have a 1:1 relationship between micorocontrollers (or sensors) and individuals. To push in the more wearable direction, it would take cheaper parts, which maybe wouldn’t even have a dancefloor context. Perhaps much like many “quantified self” devices, it would be possible to record the rhythm of one’s daily movements, and to use those to algorithmically compose a soundtrack out of any given day.

In contemporary culture clothing has been commonly subject to the aestheticization of wealth; labels, styles and materials perform double duty as potential objet d’art as well as status symbol. Sitting alongside cars, smart devices that we perpetually have on-hand have become high-dollar evolutions of the feature phone. While older ‘dumb phones’ may have had a gradient of quality (looks, call quality, battery life), newer phones can have a number of different data connections, sensors, and proprietary software. Not only that, but brand cachet is such that even over-the-top protective cases still have cutouts for the logo to shine through. This transition is not just the mobilization or augmentation of the “digital divide” (though it certainly is that in many respects), but presses this divide further into public performance.

This performativity gets more interesting in the case of wearable computing that seems to be on the crest of entering public space, and how unevenly those devices will be distributed. As other have pointed out, this more broad (though again, not complete) spread of smartphone owners across the spectrum of socio-economic status is strongly aided by carrier subsidies that allow for the point-of-purchase cost to be comparatively minimal. Google Glass, the convenient icon for this new wave of wearable computing, has no such subsidy on it as of yet (with the hefty caveat that this is early on in the device’s life). This barrier of availability and viability is perhaps the most salient, but certainly not the only one.

Media representation so far has been unilateral in ethnocultural identity, to say the absolute least. This has been most bluntly observed by the ever-growing Tumblr of White Men Wearing Google Glass (whose potential thesis of uncoolness I’ll get back to). On this level, there is no examples of non-White/cis/male individuals using this device (which itself may already have been a byproduct of the first concern of cost). The sort of Silicon Valley early-adopter culture that would put up several thousand dollars for a wearable computer sight-unseen is not prevalent outside of certain fields and regions. When there are no examples of people who aren’t in that rigid taxonomy utilizing devices, that sends a certain sort of limiting cultural message. One article notes the minutiae of this problem of current access, and speaks more to the larger cultural circumstances around “White Men Wearing Google Glass” that are a systemic problem.

Even beyond this personal relationship with the idea of something like Glass, is the interpersonal dynamics of engaging with someone who “has” when one “has not”; signifiers of stratification become that much more persistent and that much more glaringly quantifiable. The style and branding of clothing can speak to certain levels of status, but being stared in the face by a clearly identifiable object with a well-known retail tag can create distance from those who do not have such access. Users of Glass so far have spoken of it social precariousness — in part due to the unfamiliarity to others (or oneself) of these not-glasses with a camera attached to someone’s face that listen to everything — but also due to the unreciprocated split of attention they have between anyone they engage with and their new heads-up display. There is suddenly a potential need to develop new social etiquette and expectations around mobile computing that seem like they will only germinate and develop around those used to dealing with these technologies.

It’s incredibly difficult to think of a future in which some form of wearable computer or HUD isn’t more common, but as Luke W notes, we’re maybe just not there yet. To return to part of what feels like the thought behind White Men, I’ve yet to see a picture of Glass that doesn’t look at least a little tacky. The aesthetic is not necessarily congruous with other signifiers of contemporary style. With the lenses attached, they most resemble 90s single-lens sunglasses, at this point largely relegated to certain rappers or other such tastemakers.

As uneven as the transition may have initially been into any sort of mobile device (feature phone or smart device or tablet), each has been previously more focused upon remote contact and communication. Devices like Glass explicitly focus on the here-and-now; it’s no longer someone talking to their friend but someone utilizing the tech to record the environment — that includes those in the environment. This differences makes for an odd social background which must be navigated.