You know it’s a good day when you sleep in, roll out of bed to put on a fresh pot of coffee, sit back on the couch with a delicious bowl of fresh fruit and open the newspaper for a leisurely read only to find A GINORMOUS PHOTO OF YOU PRESENTING YOUR THESIS ABOVE THE FOLD!

Thanks, Peter Wayner, NY Times, and everyone who helped me put MOTIV together. I’ve drawn you all into the picture with me.

It’s been a spring full of big announcements for me. First, getting engaged, then finishing up my masters degree, launching my open-source gestural music application, MOTIV, and the hits just keep coming. I’ve got two big announcements this week…

AIGA Fresh Blood

I’ve been selected to present my thesis work from the SVA Interaction Design program to the AIGA in the second annual installment of “Fresh Blood.” While an ominous name, I think it’s a good thing. Get your tickets here. Details below:

Tuesday 7 June 2011
6:30–9:00PM

Galapagos Art Space
16 Main Street
DUMBO, Brooklyn

Facebook Bound

I couldn’t be happier to announce that, come this fall, I’ll be taking a product design position at Facebook in Palo Alto. A lot of amazing opportunities came my way post graduation, but the team of designers they’re assembling as well as the problems and opportunities that lie ahead for the product made it a difficult proposition to refuse.

Jessica and I will be hanging in New York this summer, enjoying a bit of the carefree lifestyle before we pack it up and move it on out to San Francisco. If you live in the Bay Area, let’s grab drinks!

We’re both genuinely excited about what’s ahead and look forward to going bi-coastal.

Last week I started a meetup on meetup.com for anybody interested in trying out MOTIV and perhaps even writing some pieces for it. We had 15 signups in the first week and a few folks came this Saturday to play around with it.

I’m really happy with the response so far, but there’s still a ways to go before May 5. Here’s a couple videos of the test runs:

Expressive Test – Jessica

Expressive Test – David

Have my second meeting with Robin Bargar tomorrow to show him the progress and get some input. Looking forward.

Well I’m building a new kind of instrument, so I’m trying to build a community of musicians to play with it and help build it, together, into something really valuable.

It was a little white lie—until I heard myself say it.

Then I realized how ridiculous it was that it wasn’t the truth. It immediately dawned on me how transformative turning full-force to the music & developer community could be, especially right now. To date I’ve held back from opening up to others. Until recently I was still forming my vision for the project. Without a clear vision, opening up to a community—any community—would have probably led to confusion and frustration. It might have been exciting in some regards, but would have lacked productive direction. Ultimately it might have killed what I believe could be a fundamentally transformative concept in digital music performance. I needed some time to figure out what it was that I believed in.

Now—having developed some of the rudimentary principles as a prototype, and having a clear vision for Motiv, I think it’s the perfect time to invite others to play, develop, and otherwise shape the experience. Community is the driving force behind the development of WordPress, openFrameworks, and the Arduino physical computing platform (not to mention all the Kinect Hacking happening as well). Each one of these projects relies on the collective shaping power of the community and a directing vision of a core group in communication with that community.

So, today, I’m Issuing an open call on meetup.com to musicians and developers alike. Let’s get together, play, and develop Motiv into an intuitive, powerful, and expressive musical tool. Let’s collaborate! If you have friends who fall into one of those categories, spread the word!

Join the meet-up group:
Motiv Musicians MEETUP.COM Page

Share it on Twitter by using this link:
http://www.meetup.com/motiv-music/

This is gonna be fun.

Post-It sketches of potential gestural visualizations

Today I’m down at sxsw. If you’re here and want to meet up, tweet @strangenative! Before I skipped town for a bit of nerdy r&r I did a bit more work on developing my prototype. At the encouragement of the gentlemen of berg I began thinking about how I might communicate this concept without having to explain it. No epiphanies on that yet, but it did lead me to thinking about the system’s visual feedback.

I think the system’s visuals could do a lot to communicate what’s happening without explanation. I started by sketching. There are already some great ideas in there. I’ll be creating a lot more of those little sketches before I’m ready to actually make anything happen though.

Working in openFrameworks on Monday, I successfully determined the velocities of all the virtual Kinect joints, and derived the magnitude of the body’s movement from that information. I also did a bit of visual graphing to understand the patterns of my own movement. Then I managed to actually map the magnitude of my movement to this thing I’m calling “Intensity.” Intensity in my system really just means how densely layered the composition is. The more “intense” a piece becomes, the more layers of instrumentation are added.

Enjoy! I’m off to walk around Austin and steel myself for long nights and lots of cool people meeting.

First Feedback Visuals & Magnitude Mapping

Gestural Mapping: Intensity/Magnitude