Here are a few more videos from last week's session with ASU. The first is a math game for two players to help students learn about slope through physical and audio interaction. The players can listen to the change in coordinates and then try to determine the right slope based on their positions in three-dimensional space.

There are some issues here with finding the right location for the balls that will prompt some work in the future. Knowing, for example, that you are "on" the right point in the Z-axis may require different kinds of audio cues. One idea we've had is a kind of sonic prompt that fades out when you've hit your mark, but gets louder and louder as you approach the boundary between two integers. This, we hope, will help people visualize where the number 2 and 3 are, rather than floating on the boundary between them and continually triggering the audio sample.

The next video is an improvised dance that the students can choreograph as they each try to reach their X and Y coordinates. This is a variation on the "Coordinate Game" that we had developed the day before. Hopefully, students will get an embodied sense of how the Cartesian system works as they move along in their algebra/geometry units.

It's not quite a game yet, but there's something really fun and compelling about making your own art work (a dance piece) that corresponds to your math assignment.

The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music is a book that Miller Puckette is writing. I've been working my way through it while on vacation here in rural Oregon. Very useful stuff, especially for non-audio folks, like me, who want to get the most out of things like Max/MSP and Puredata. In fact, it comes with a linked package of Puredata example patches.

For my midterm project, I hacked the sink in our 10th-floor bathroom.

The sink had an IR sensor with an exposed control box. I cracked that open, split off the power and sensor-data lines, and got it trigger a light show under the sink and play a sound sample from a speaker I attached under the porcelain. I left a record button hooked up to it, and, pretty soon, people were recording their own strange sounds and messages that would play every time someone went to wash their hands.

The proprietors extend a further invitation to the world of technology as surveyed by one its most humble practitioners as he confounds the assembled with tales of a truly dreary technology that nevertheless possesses the potential to improve the standard of living among this planet's poorest citizens. The producers are indebted once again to the members of the freesound project who contributed samples of their efforts for the creation of this auditory presentation under the esteemed Creative Commons Sampling Plus license:

The proprietors present this fine entertainment, being the podcast in which one Mr. Edwards expounds on noise, aural and digital, and how said noise ties together the coin toss, the credit card, and Guantanamo Bay. Humbly presented for your distinguished listening and with due thanks to the members of the freesound project who contributed samples of their efforts for the creation of this auditory presentation under the esteemed Creative Commons Sampling Plus license: