Flexible drop timings
The nature of an interactive installation such as the Dropship means that your creation is at the mercy of the public. Whatever preconceptions you have for how people will use and abuse it may occur some of the time, but mostly, people are going to find their own weird and wonderful methods to enjoy your work. With only two cranks and a button for people to interact with, our recipients have limited options, however one important factor is completely down to the burners - when they press the Drop button.
As mentioned in the previous post, the moments just before the Drop are really important for creating a big juicy, ground-shaking "PPHHHWWWOOOOOOOAAAAAARRRRRR!!!!" (technical term) effect, or, as Ned Stark correctly puts it
The Drop must be carefully crafted for maximum impact, yet we want the Drop button to be immediately responsive to when people push it so that they feel completely in control. If someone presses the button literally milliseconds before the beginning of a two-bar phrase, we want to hear the drop immediately. But what if the button is pressed two or three beats before the next convenient time to drop the beat? Clearly, we need something to occur immediately, but for the actual drop to only happen when it makes most musical sense. Here are a few of the Drop options that people have, meaning that they can press the button at any time and still have the beat rock in on a solid beat 1.
Up All Night and Day and Night and Day and Night Forever
Last weekend I was at MIDIHACK in Stockholm and met David Whiting, a data engineer at Spotify. For David's hack, he made an absolutely bad-ass algorithmic minimal techno machine in Scala. Here are a couple of excerpts: Excerpt #1 // Excerpt #2
With David's permission, I'm going to recreate some of his techniques in Pure data and hook them up to our real time synths and drums. Boom! The Dropship now support minimal techno!
