Axoloti Wheelemin Project
thanks...its just a super simple patch with the note scale object, oscillator, a reverb and pot turned by the wheel 
Cool, maybe if you added a murcury switch, you could have it trigger something when shaking.
thanks for the good idea...i am not sure if i actually want the shaking do something ... maybe later.
at the moment my focus is on making sure the player can not do something musically "wrong".
otherwise i have some light resistors here. i could easily atache them to the saucer. by shaking the lightresistor reacts to the light changes and things could be modulated
drilled a hole into the dish with the size of a potentiometer knob, pressed the potentiometer knob into the hole, surrounded the potentiometer knob with hot glue...inserted the potentiometer shaft into the potentiometer knob :-), atached a stone to the potentiometer that makes it always hanging down (basically a gravity sensor) i have actually 12 potentiometrs attached and 2 photo resistor. what you see in the vid is only the beginning of a bigger "system" that has no system yet
So simple and yet effective! Almost a marketable idea. Like something one could buy in a toy shop. She could have smiled at least once though.
This is very interesting in the sense that one must start to evaluate where playing ends and playing an instrument starts. The resulting music is beautiful for sure but one wonders in how far the girls really exert control. Basically you have programmed a limited set of possible permuataion and what they do is trigger some of these posibilities. Is there still a creative process going on? Or is it just an impulse exchange between technology and the human machine.
For someone like me who always thinks in terms of composing his own music, so exerting control over the creation of my music by evaluating chance and deciding what I like and do not like, then keeping what like and discarding what I do not like (I gues that is the core of composing something) your approach almost feels like a threat. If it is so easy to let beautifull music almost create itself, why shoudl I then stil be so serious about composing. The bowls is overflowing so quickly nowadays that it is actually no wonder one's msuic is hardly being heard.
Or is it a bit like photography verus painitng? Painting was never the same after photography came about, although one could of course also argue that it needed photography to free itself up.
OOOOh, don't overthink it....
Its like why did they climb that mountain, because it was there.
Each artistic medium does not deserve to be compared to another, painting v's photo, movies versus books, music versus spoken word, I guess the list is limitless.
What does change it, is the way we express it, and often this can be easily witnessed during the performance.
hi brasso. i totally agree with you. the music i am making myself is usually very experimental and there are not many people who are interested in what my ear finds interesting. i love sound in every way. i have a friend who is a fantastic violin player and ovetone singer. maybe one of the best in the world. (i am myself a trombone and tuba player). this friend is working as a music therapist. his practise is full of strange instruments. there is no violin there. so i asked him: why is there no violin and what is the quality of the instruments you have in your practise?" he said: "the violin is just to complex for most of the people. the instruments i have here sound good but are simple enough to give one an experience of making music without 20 - 60 years of obsession with it." i was trying to follow this idea. i dont have a big ideal of making people happy with music. but i could see that it was some sort of a magic moment for people to be able to make music. why not? i am amazed myself to be in a defencive position here (partly against my own opinions) since i consider myself as the biggest hater of clichee.
Oh no. This is not meant as a critisism of these devices. They could indeed also be very nice tools for terapies.
Your friends remark about the violin is spot on anyway. Nothing is a sbad for a beginners spirit as trying out such a complex instrument. it wil then scream out: "You suck at this!"
I was only trying to be a bit philosophical about what makes msuic music and the danger of taking music too seriosuly, especially when there is such a small chance of recognition. In that respect devices like these are indeed much more non-committal. No pretenses. One simply undergoes the experience.
On a less serious note I must however repeat my earlier remark: Sshouldn't the young ladies in your video smile a little bit, if only now and then? In other words. Are they actually only doing this for fun or just to please Daddy? Or is this more a cultural thing? Should well behaved children just not smile on camera where you live?
Only being curious though.
Children can be funny when it comes to things like that. Its like they are in a museum trying out a hands on experiment. They get bored very quickly. Not smiling though just makes it look funny.. 
i know they look a bit serious. i tried to make them smile. but then it looked fake. so i thought they should look normal. you might be right with he cultural thing. they are half indians and the face expression could remind one of some of the indian musicians playing a sitar for example in unbelievable presicion and speed without any expression on the face, staring straight into nothingness. i wonder if i will next time film some old portuguese farmers from the neighborhood playing the instruments. but surely people would ask if this is a felini imitation
i downloaded your chamber music for starship...beautiful stuff!
reminds me of some of my "space adventures"
Or record the sound, and put a video of something completely different over the top.
Don't have to video the instruments being played, but it does help show the proof of concept, which is pretty cool.
I am only enjoying your videos very much , just hoping for a third girl playing Tabla/dholak...
How did you do the Tanpura? braids tanpura? and how did you do that thing with a phototransistor ?
thanks philoop, i am actually working on a tabla. its a bit more tricky to make sure the beats are rythmical (nothing is worse than a non rythmical percussion for my taste). but i think i have come up with something.
the tambura is based on brds/plucked. 4 oscillators/instances which are tuned to the 4 strings of a tambura. each time the flashlight moves on or of the photoresistor the next one/note is triggered. its not perfect because if you move around to fast or not accuratly enough you trigger to much. i have ideas how to make it accurate but i found its sounding not bad like this either.