News

IDMIL Project at McGill Headway Magazine

Avrum Hollinger's work is featured in the latest issue of McGill's Headway Magazine, a collaboration with Profs. Robert Zatorre and Virginia Penhune.

Avrum Hollinger (middle), a graduate student in Marcelo Wanderley's (left) electrical engineering lab, built a metal-free keyboard that can be played inside a highly magnetic MRI machine. The special instrument now makes it possible for neuroscientist Robert Zatorre (right) to monitor musicians' brain activity while they play.

 

SenseStage website now live

Annotated circuit diagram of the MiniBee wireless node

The website for the SenseStage project is now live, with download links for all the software tools being developed for the project. The project features:

  • Wireless Sensor Hardware: A small, custom designed PCB board that can be worn on the wrist, sewn into clothing, or embedded in objects.
  • Data Sharing Environment: Collaborators subscribe to any data streams they want to use, and supply data streams of their own for use by other collaborators.
  • Real-Time Control Of Media: In development are modules allowing for analysis of data streams providing building blocks that generate complex behaviours for output media.
 

Video from SenseStage workshop

Here's a video showing some of the projects and feedback generated by the SenseStage Workshop held May 16-23, 2009. SenseStage is a collaborative project between the IDMIL and labXmodal at Concordia Unversity; the workshop was held to begin exploration of new hardware and software tools developed for using low-cost, distributed sensing in the media arts.

 

T-Stick Performance at ICMC

This is D. Andrew Stewart playing his composition “Everybody to the power of one” for soprano T-Stick digital musical instrument, Monday August 17th in Pollack Hall, McGill University.

Everybody to the Power of One (ICMC Performance) from Joseph Malloch on Vimeo.

 

Introducing the MiniBee

The MiniBee is a small, arduino-like circuit board designed for the SenseStage project, a collaboration between the IDMIL and Chris Salter's lab at Concordia University. The boards include the footprint for a XBee mesh-networking wireless transceiver, creating compact, low-cost sensing nodes which we are now using for investigating ubiquitous computing in the media arts.

The MiniBee circuit board

The first batch of 100 MiniBee Rev.A boards have been manufactured, assembled and successfully tested :-)