I just read about a concert called "Reunion" in 1968 at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto.

The concert was artist and chess player Marcel Duchamp playing a game of chess against the avant-garde composer John Cage.

Under each square on the board was a series of photoelectric cells which, when triggered by game play, produced the music.

How could I reproduce this?

11/10/2005 3:45:21 PM

quit trying to reproduce art that has already been done

that is how you can reproduce it

11/10/2005 3:49:49 PM

I'm just looking for the technical know-how

not criticism from someone ill-equipped to give it to me

11/10/2005 3:51:35 PM

I AM NOT THE ONE FUCKING ASKING THE QUESTION

SO IT LOOKS LIKE I AM NOT THE ONE WHO IS ILL-EQUIPPED

11/10/2005 3:53:57 PM

sorry... can I borrow your photoelectric music-playing chessboard sometime?

dick

11/10/2005 3:55:21 PM

how the fuck is anyone on here going to know how to reproduce that

11/10/2005 3:56:00 PM

by thinking

think about how I could attach photoelectric switches to a MIDI sequencer or some equivalent program or device

11/10/2005 3:57:14 PM

got quite a few engineers. someone could prob do it

11/10/2005 3:57:48 PM

seek out one of John Cage's living composer pupils

or their website

he has alot of them

11/10/2005 3:59:18 PM

hell... maybe photoelectric is not necessary

how about two contacts on each square with current running through them and a gap between them

the piece bridges the gap

---

my friend has just suggested using several barcode readers and barcoding the bottom of each piece

[Edited on November 10, 2005 at 4:01 PM. Reason : -]

11/10/2005 4:00:12 PM

couldn't you just put some kind of button trigger on each square

11/10/2005 4:06:15 PM

I'd really like it to differentiate between the different types of pieces

how about the second, and more difficult part?

how to convert this input into music

possibly algebraic chess notation would be useful?



[Edited on November 10, 2005 at 4:18 PM. Reason : -]

11/10/2005 4:16:06 PM

wire grid inlaid into the board...connect the wires running vertical across the board to a one port of a microcontroller

connect the wires running vertical to the other port of a microcontroller

Put 5V on one port

Make the bottom of the chess peices metallic

Slice and dice the functionality with software at will


RecieveDick, just because you are a poor pathetic waste of a human being, doesn't mean the rest of us are.

Edit

Just saw your update. To get the peices to play a different note is going to take more than my casual evaluation has generated. Let me think about this.

[Edited on November 10, 2005 at 4:22 PM. Reason : x]

11/10/2005 4:19:53 PM

how could I differentiate between pieces?

also, how could I indicate when a piece has been captured?

I'm still thinking about how to interface this with some sort of musical production

11/10/2005 4:22:13 PM

what you are wanting to do now clearly cant be implemented easily at all.

11/10/2005 4:28:25 PM

but it WAS done

the board was constructed by Lowell Cross

Quote :

"Reunion This piece was performed in 1968 at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto. Lowell Cross constructed a chess board equipped with photoreceptors that served as a gating mechanism to transmit or cut off sound produced by other musicians and to control lights. John Cage and Marcel Duchamp played a game of chess. Other participants included Teeny Duchamp, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman. The book Marcel Duchamp and John Cage by Shigeko Kubota (1970) contains photographs and a recording of this performance."

11/10/2005 4:36:35 PM

it may have been done

but it will cost you a hell of a lot

especially if you want different pieces in the same spot to play different music

11/10/2005 4:42:36 PM

yea. and the capturing part would take a LOT more work

11/10/2005 4:49:19 PM

They make pads that send midi data


All you'd have to do is assign that midi data to a specific note on some kind of generator.

If you actually wanted to build it yourself it would be easiest to use the contacts and midi board on an old cheapo keyboard.

I don't think a chessboard is the best way to do this though, there are so many more ergonomic designs that would be much easier to use and wouldn't impose the physical problems of a chessboard. I think a midi organ pedalboard would be much easier to make and much more practical, or a stuido midi interface controller which you could simply buy.

11/10/2005 4:49:26 PM

Quote :

"RecieveDick, just because you are a poor pathetic waste of a human being, doesn't mean the rest of us are."

see, coming from someone who actually wasn't a flaming bitch nigger, I might care

but flaming bitch niggers are people who say they're quitting TWW, but then don't

11/10/2005 4:59:11 PM

Actually, now that I think about it, it wouldn't be tooo hard to keep up with what peice was what AND capturing.

You can store the state of the board into the mcu. And provided you don't do whacky stuff like pick the peice up and hold it for a long time then you could use a "sliding" algorithm so that when the mcu realizes one peice is being slid - eventually into the square where another peice was - then it could perform the capture sound. Also by always sliding the peices, it would be easier to track which peice was which and to perfrom certain sounds based on what peice captures what, etc.

It would make an interesting ECE Sr. design.

PS. The trying to bother me about me quitting and coming back affects me about as much as the bald jokes, that is to say, it doesn't.

[Edited on November 10, 2005 at 5:10 PM. Reason : x]

11/10/2005 5:09:54 PM

I suppose it would be helpful if I got Lowell Cross' schematics for his original board

11/10/2005 5:50:35 PM

i challenge anyone to a game fo chess, and if you win i will paypal you 20. if i win you owe me nothing.

11/10/2005 5:53:29 PM

For the differentiating pieces:
-Weight sensors?
-Different colored LEDs for each piece?
-Microchips on the pieces/board? This would allow you to customize it a lot easier (presuming you had an interface of some sort to work with)

Not sure how cost-effective any of those are, suggestion though.

11/10/2005 6:06:44 PM

State409c is a faggot

11/10/2005 8:17:37 PM

The way I'd differentiate between the pieces would be to use different thicknesses of padding and just let the velocity sensitive keyboard contacts pick up the relative impact differences between the peices and then seperate them through software. This would work as long as you didn't do anything like slam a piece down on the board or anything.

11/10/2005 9:57:38 PM

camera
clear table over it
different colors on the bottom of the peices

11/10/2005 10:01:17 PM

Another way to differentiate between pieces: Have 6 pairs of contacts on each square. Each piece will have a strip of metal that lines up with a certain row, for example row 1 may be a pawn, row 2 a rook, etc. So when you place a piece on a square it would complete a different circuit depending on what piece you use. The drawback would be that you would probably have to put a notch in each piece to assure that they are all lined up properly.

11/10/2005 10:54:59 PM

interesting idea

the idea above seems easy to do, although a slightly different implementation would make it easier - you could make the chess board like a breadboard with 6 holes in the center of each square. the pieces could have prongs like electrical outlet plugs on the bottoms so they fit right into the hole

then depending on how many contacts are removed and added, you will know what's going on.

[Edited on November 10, 2005 at 11:11 PM. Reason : .]

11/10/2005 11:10:28 PM

I milled it over with some people

I think we've decided on using a video camera suspended above the board

a guy I know has already done some work writing software for something (marginally) similar

the project will actually begin with him and another programmer working out a protocol for this... something that can carry all of the relevant data regarding long algebraic chess notation and have the capability of carrying other data

this will be our bridge between the input from the camera and the output into MIDI
thus far on my team I've got a programmer (graduating in a few weeks) who focused in multimedia, another multimedia CSC major who is also an electronic musician, a psychology major and musician and myself

11/11/2005 1:30:09 AM

surprised RFID hasn't been mentioned... probably unreasonable cost-wise now, but eventually it'd be the cheapest and cleanest implementation of this. Each position would have its own RFID cell, each piece would have its own RFID identifier, tune the sensitivity so you have each cell receiving a tiny sphere with a cross-sectional area of roughly the size of a board position. You'd be able to do this with off-the-shelf components obscenely cheaply within a couple years.

Seems like you'd also be able to put a magnet in each of the pieces, and go with State409c's idea of a wire grid... use game state to determine which piece was at the position movement was detected to originate from, update game state with its final posisition when you detect momement stops (or pause waiting to re-detect movement if you detect it leave one cell without entering another (i.e. the piece is drawn vertically away from the board)), etc etc...

The RFID approach is cleaner in that it'd be impossible to desynchronize the computer's understanding of the game's state by, say, capturing a piece and then removing the wrong piece... but I gather that RFID receivers are a bit costly.

[Edited on November 11, 2005 at 2:24 AM. Reason : *]

11/11/2005 2:16:52 AM

my main tech guy suggested RFID right off... but after we discussed cost he came up with this camera software thing

RFID would probably be the cleanest installation

11/11/2005 2:45:10 AM

The camera-based implementation is probably going to have some snags. The alternating colors of the gameboard will be enough of a visual cue to determine position, but you'll probably end up needing a fairly expensive camera and lighting setup to differentiate between some of the pieces without totally compromising the aesthetics (altering piece design or adding visual cues to the pieces). The software will be a bitch to write under the best of circumstances.

I believe you could use op-amps on each of the 16 wires to basically get a binary movement/no movement signal from the fairly low voltage that a moving magnet would induce in the wires, and feed that into a microcontroller, or even the parallel port of a computer probably.

[Edited on November 11, 2005 at 3:29 AM. Reason : *]

11/11/2005 3:15:13 AM

You don't have anyone in your group with the necessary DSP experience to get this done.

Also, this will never happen. You make these flighty threads about once a week. There fun to think about, kinda like, "man, what if I won the lottery"...but thats about it.

11/11/2005 3:51:40 AM

enough with the nay-saying

I'm thinking the camera would not have to be that expensive if we paint the board and pieces for high contrast and work out some stable lighting

and you're kind of right

I won't personally do the technical aspects of this project
see I have lots and lots of ideas... but when I can find the right people and bring them together things happen


as far as DSP goes, the electronic musician has experience
and I also know an audio engineer here in town (and the primary tech guy's brother is a musician with a strong interest in parametric music)

[Edited on November 11, 2005 at 10:08 AM. Reason : -]

11/11/2005 10:08:13 AM

There is absolutely no need for DSP whatsoever. Midi solves that, you simply use a hardware synth or an already assembled software generator from there on out. I don't understand how DSP even came up in this conversation.

This does seem fairly impractical snewf. Not saying you can't do it, it just seems like your efforts could be better placed actually building something a little more practical in a studio environment rather than temporarily assembling a chessboard to make sound for a few hours of fun.

11/11/2005 11:43:34 AM

My "snap" reaction is "What is the camera for then?"

Because

If you are trying to use the thing like I think you are, then you are going to have to digitize the analog images it captures, and then process them - which, if I am not mistaken, is DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING.

But I gave just a little more than a cursory contemplation of this camera method because generally speaking at this point, comboined with how you have all these manic ideas ranging from politics, to showing your dick, to whetever, I think anything other than something simple to implement, is a joke. In fact....if you get a working prototype, I will give you $100 for succeeding.

11/11/2005 12:49:11 PM

state409c has hit the nail on its bald head

11/11/2005 2:46:26 PM

you'll give me $100 eh?

I'm going to hold you to that

11/11/2005 3:06:02 PM

don't let your team see that - they'll want a share of the profit. hah

11/11/2005 3:11:43 PM

nah I'll totally tell them

they'll be excited

11/11/2005 3:45:31 PM

i'll match the $100 - no fucking way will you ever do this

11/11/2005 4:11:00 PM

going with the contacts idea, couldn't a (this is very impractical but I'll throw it in anyways) small chip be inside each piece, so that when the current runs through it, it could generate a different tune?

11/11/2005 4:40:06 PM

MAYBE YOU SHOULD BUILD A TIME MACHINE

GO TO THE YEAR 2045 WHEN THIS IS PRACTICAL

AND COME BACK WITH SOME STUFF

SEAMS LIKE THAT WOULD BE EASIER

11/11/2005 4:48:19 PM

stop the fucking trolling already; good god. it's so stupid that it's annoying even me.

11/11/2005 6:17:26 PM

okay so $100 from State409c

and $100 from OmarBadu

11/11/2005 7:20:05 PM

Give me a proposed budget/plan and I'll contribute. Beer doesn't count as a part of it

11/12/2005 8:22:36 AM

Quote :

"MAYBE YOU SHOULD BUILD A TIME MACHINE GO TO THE YEAR 2045 1968 WHEN THIS IS PRACTICAL YOU CAN STEAL THE BOARD AND COME BACK WITH SOME STUFF SEAMS LIKE THAT WOULD BE EASIER"

11/12/2005 12:40:17 PM

it'll take a little while to work out a proposal

but I'll def send it to you

11/12/2005 12:48:43 PM

THIS IS THE BIGGEST JOKE IN TECH TALK SINCE THE LAST GARGS POST

11/12/2005 1:54:19 PM