Different Drums Of Ireland – Heartbeat

Recorded at Quivvy.

Heartbeat

bingbangbong | Myspace Video

(c) Different Drums of Ireland

RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2006

Bell Tree Sculpture Hampton Court 2006

bingbangbong | Myspace Video

Stereographs are three dimensional photographs visible when two separate images are viewed in a particular way.

 The first image above is a very good example that I took recently on a short visit to Amsterdam. To me this really captured a lot about the city and I think it is far more powerful because of the 3D.  The perpective with the tower in the distance is amazing especially when the bell and handlebar on the bike seem to jump out of the image. 

FRUSTRATION ALERT! 

Most people will take a little practise to work out how to do this, and many will give up before they do. The first time you see it for real is usually recognised by the “wow” that invariably accompanies it! I’ve also seen too many people fake it, it’s not easy, there’s no failure but it is well worth trying :)   This is what our eyes do every day but just at a different focal point. If you have regular working binocular vision then you CAN see these!  If you don’t see these at first, persevere! 

How to View Stereographs

 Face straight on to the image as much as possible. 

You will be focusing on a point that is half way between the image and your eyes but seeing the image that is in the background. Let me explain that in a slightly different way. Your eye muscles are focused on the half way point but your brain is focused on the image. It sounds confusing doesn’t it. 

Try this… 

hold a pen somewhere around the half way point with the tip in line with some part of the image. Move the pen toward your eyes and focus on the tip – observe in your peripheral vision what is happening in the background as the two images of the stereograph become three. Yes? 

Now at one point only you will see the tip of the pen in focus and ALSO the third image in focus. That’s the point. 

Checking alignment 

When a child (or an adult?) did you ever touch noses with another person and move your head slightly to see the other person’s eyes move in a humourous way? no? just it’s me then… 

Try rotating your head a little but still focus on the pen – can you see the two outer images rotate as you move? what happens to the center one? 

If you can maintain this focus on where the pen is but remove the pen you might now see the center image in 3d, more than likely it’s not there yet because your eyes will want to change focus to the screen not the imaginary spot where the pen tip was. Keep trying. 

Taken over the shoulder of the late Paul Phillips in 2007. He is videoing an amazing gig by the Tea Merchants featuring our own Rob Forkner in the video with Chris Buckley and Charles Branch giving it loads! We miss you big lad.

Most often we initially lack the fine muscle control to maintain the focal point, it gets much easier. Watch out for varying image widths which mean that you have to adjust how much you ‘cross’ your eyes. When I occasionally have difficulty in seeing a new image I pick something in the images that is very distinctive, an obvious fixed point like the snowman’s hat in the image above and then work on simply aligning those two elements in the central image. It takes a second to get the fine tuning and then it ‘pops’ into 3D. (see wow effect above) 

How To Take Stereographic images

They are dead easy to take. Simply move the camera to where your two eyes would be. … pick a left eye image - CLICK. Move 2 inches to where your right eye would be CLICK. That’s it. All done bar the photoshop or screen grabber and MS paint to place the 2 shots side by side! 

It costs just a few seconds extra to capture any image in a stereographic manner, so I now take them almost instinctively and they really add to my enjoyment of looking back at stuff.  Really it’s a significant thing for me and so easy to do with modern memory cards – I love having an iPhone with lots of memory! 

• TIP#1 – It’s easier on the eye if the images are taller then they are wide.
  • -It is much more strain on the eyes to overlay two wide images so go tall where possible
• TIP#2 – When you arrange the photos side by side you need to put the right eye on the left side of the pair and vice versa obviously.
  • -If you view them the wrong way around it will look odd – check them out both ways and pick the better version for you.
• TIP#3 – Try to make the two images as close as possible in composition when taking them.
  • -Later on you will have to trim off bits at the sides that aren’t in both images so save time by taking to seconds to define the edges of the shot now as you compose it.
• TIP#4 both images should be of the same size and image quality.
  • -Often modern auto-exposure cameras will compensate for even small focus changes so you can end up with two very different images. Photoshop etc can fix a lot but sometimes it just doesn’t work – Take plenty – pick the best.

Here are some more stereographic images that I feel make it particularly accessible (e.g. focus on the end of the tape in the inage below) or just are good examples of using the effect to draw attention to the main object like the video in the image of Paul Phillips. 

Feel free to comment and if you want to try to take some images yourself, have a go & send me the results. If you can’t join them or have problems  I can do a few. 

I’ll be adding these to my facebook stereograph page  

BTW Most of these are taken with my iPhone4 & some with my well-loved Nikon D70 

You can focus independently on the end of the tape and on Matt. whichever you go focus on, the other will be unfocused

 

  

Rob Forkner & Andreas Transo examine a heavy blue plastic ring for the benefit of 3D stereographic research

I really like the strong 3D effect here being so high up and with the lighting half way providing a very definite middle ground, you’ll see what I mean

A collection of various percussive bits in a hasty still life thingy – notice how I didn’t know to trim the edges of each image to be the same and therefore the edges are funky in 3D

Anyway, I have many more that I have collected but I hope that these have been interesting, I’m loving the fact that I can record memories and situations in three dimensions. It’s useful professionally when visualising a work site or a piece of equipment in the design stage (yes it even works on my wee cad programme – more on Sketchup in a different post. 

Hope you enjoyed these, send me yours and I’ll post them here or develop a gallery or something if there are a few people interested. Feel free to comment below.

-P

 

All images (c)Paul Marshall 2005-2011

 

 

  It’s New Year’s Eve 2010 and I’m mindful of the fact that we’re entering a new Year. This year is special because it marks the 10th Anniversary of my first formal musical instrument installation.

Of course that didn’t just come from nowhere so I thought I’d take today and lay out some of the progress that had brought me and bingbangbong to where we are today.

In the mid 1990s I became the single parent of my 3 children (aged 4 – 9 months) following a marital separation. I was employed as a civil servant working for Making Belfast Work as the ‘Data Manager’, initially to work on the census and related data but ended up as the IT manager following my boss’s move into IT consultancy.

There I was, a clerk seconded to EOI grade but doing the job of a Deputy Principal, I loved it I have to say. Working in Marie Therese McGivern’s Policy & Research Unit (PRU). I was the IT budget holder for hundreds of thousands of pounds and with responsibility for the IT for a chunk of the DOE with specific responsibility for Year 2000 issues (remember that!) and the maintenance of IT systems for all of MBW as well as data analysis based on census data – I was also responsible for creating the funding formula that brought analysis down to Enumeration districts rather than wards and thereby enabling funding to reach urban areas that were previously underfunded because the areas around them were ‘better off’.

Anyway, several years of this ensued and whilst my reports and performance appraisals were very, very excellent, the moratorium on promotion meant that my bosses were unable to promote me. I was already off the pay scale for my grade and I had to receive a cash payment because there was ‘nowhere else for me to go’.

A job came up in the Fair Employment Commission that offered a permenent promotion but it meant leaving the Civil service. At that stagem down to one wage coming in I took the job, simply because it could pay me better money. I was not happy at the FEC, I’ll not go into details here but the person who was temporarily in post before I was appointed, and over whose head I got the job was, lets just say ‘unhelpful’ (and I’m being exceedingly generous here)

I lasted 6 months or so and it became intolerable, I could stick it no more. I sat down and did some calculations and after paying for childminding, travel and the costs of simply being in work, I was coming home with £200/mo plus whatever my ex was contributing and whatever support I could receive from the government. Add to that the stress of divorce, raising kids on my own, and a deep dissatisfaction in work that nobody seemed to take seriously and you have the basis of my decision to resign and become a full time parent.

There was a brief period of ‘wound-licking’, but anyone who knows me knows that I can’t sit still for long and I’m certainly no couch potato, so it is no surprise that I started to look for alternative ways of work that I work in alongside my family duties & soccer-mom requirements - A tough one when your youngest is pre-school.

I did lots of stuff including wiring an office for an IT network, but mostly I relied on my lifelong passions for music generally and for drums /drumming in particular. I got involved with the local college through my friend Paddy Craig. I taught a little and was also working with Paddy and a group of the students playing drums at parades & festivals including playing drums for the Giants, the then new Belfast Ice Hockey team – you’ll know the kind of thing, play when our team are on attack to raise the crowd’s energy. It was a lot of fun & we got to watch all the games for free

At this time, internet access was on dialup by freeserve! I was paying £0.02 per minute which doesn’t sound much but I managed to create bills of around £100/mo. There was no such thing as broadband, no always-on alternative and dial-up meant that the phoneline was in use when I wanted to go on the web. At this time (98-99) I also started to publish drum info on the web because at that stage such information was very spread out and there was little available. I was writing initially on Powerhaus.net but eventually, with the support of my friends on the Usenet newsgroup RMMP, that became Drumdojo.com – which co-incidentally is also 10 years old this year. I now have hundreds of domains and have created literallt hundreds of sutes over the years but now I’m down to maybe 20 or so that still exist and are worth the effort that they require to maintain & update.

I had also spent a little time working with Young At Art. YAA is an week-long Belfast children’s festival held in May of each year but also involves outreach and other programmes throughout the year. With YAA I was the festival artist in residence for a number of years doing lots of workshops on sound as art and  taking kids for sound-walks. In one case I undertook the lead artist position the multi-media project ‘Open Your Earlids’.

For ‘earlids’ I was sound recording a day in the life of each of 5 schools in urban and rural locations. Working with a professional photographer and with the children using disposable cameras to capture their own perspective on their day, I brought the lot together into a 3 minute multi-media sideshow – I have a copy of those 5 somewhere – I should dig that out and put it here….

Ok here it is ’Open Your Earlids‘  a Real Media Playlist. (There are clearances in place for using the kids’ images here but it’s also 8-9 years ago so they’re all teenagers or adults now)

I have left out one type of work in the above however because it needs to stand separate from everything else in the story of bingbangbong. I refer of course to my time from 1998  spent working with DaCapo, the early years music organisation led by the three witches  Jane, Michelle and Ali. I think the work of DaCapo is tremendous, leaning on the work of Reggio Emilia, Kodaly (Solfa) and Dalcroze (Eurythmics) and at the time was ground-breaking. I attended a free workshop courtesy of YAA and was approached by DaCapo afterwards to ask if I might be interested in working with them. Thus began my work with Early Years music.

I found this group of children really awesome to work with, perhaps it was because they were the same kinds of ages as my own kids (at this stage they were 2-6yo) but I seemed to have a natural ‘way’ with them, my classes almost always went smoothly and the kids and teachers seemed to get a lot out of it. It;s a shame that there wasn’t more funding available because the schools I did work with were tremendously appreciative and wanted more & more although it was not feasible to do it unfunded.

This exposure to many schools, classrooms and outside playgrounds around the country really was the spark that led me to identify need for outdoor musical instruments, I mentioned it to the schools and they got it immediately, yes yes yes! was the unanimous response and so I started to look more into the theoretical science of instruments, material suitability & limitations.

Arising from that inspiration and research, I spoke with Young At Art in 2000 proposing to create a temporary installation for the festival. The installation would be musical instruments made from scrap and re-purposed ‘stuff’ and it would be intended to be disposable at the end of the festival.

Anna Cutler, MD of Young At Art was in discussions with the Lyric Theatre, the venue for many of the festival events and mentioned my proposal, to which the theatre replied, “we’re creating a sculpture garden, would you like to make a permanent musical installation”. Little did I know but that particular invitation was to be the springboard for what is now bingbangbong.

I created some wall chimes &  windchimes and worked with Artists Amanda Montgomery & Angela George to create a centerpiece sculpture carved from wood with a ‘sound ball’ and several bronze udu drums.

Unfortunately, the sculpture garden is no longer there because the theatre site has been completely torn down and is in the process of re-building a terriffic new building, so that piece of bingbangbong history sadly is now gone.

This post is already 1300 words long so I’ll divide it here so it becomes pre-bingbangbong and post-bingbangbong.

There’s a reason why no-one has really seen me since Christmas, well… 2 reasons to be precise :)

I have been very fortunate to have suitably-coordinated loved ones who took me up on my very unsubtle hints as to what I’d like for Christmas The theme is of course Driving games. Whilst over the years I have purchased various gaming consoles ‘for the house’, I’ve never been much of a gamer. Many years ago (10+) I owned a Playstation 1 and the only game that was of any interest to me was ridge racer. I got pretty good at that even though it was played using the standard controller.

In the years between I have been blssfully ignorant of driving games and the degree of development that has been ongoing. I’m not exactly sure what it was that triggered me to look at them again in the autumn but I’m very glad that I did.

What is clear that thse presents won’t be left languishing in the corner, nor I suspect, will the games be completed and then consigned to the ‘done that’ pile.

I have two games now, Gran Turismo 5 and F1 2010. They are similar in terms of the basic objectives but very different games altogether and I suspect aimed at a very different kind of gamer with GT5 being more about fun and the experience of driving whereas F1 2010 being the official game of Formula One is much, much more serious. This difference also shows in the discussions and forums online although that is not to say that GT5 is not a serious bit of kit requiring significant skill because it is and it does!

Both games have a variety of  ’assists’ available, features that make the vehicles more ‘idiot-proof’, features like automatic transmission, assisted-braking, traction control etc. I’m still using this baby-stage using all assists because it’s still fun and I’m not looking to be terribly competitive, just getting used to the feel of the cars and learning the tracks. It really makes a huge difference when you know what’s coming at you when you come out of a blind corner or crest a hill.

Lets look at the games.

Gran Turismo 5

This was released in November 2010, it was highly anticipated and something like 5 years after GT4. It would appear that I dropped into the scene just at the right time because an awful lot of people have been chomping at the bit for a long time…

GT5 has around 1000 various cars available and dozens of tracks, the selection is simply mind-boggling. For example I have been having tremendous fun racing Mini Coopers around Monaco, taking rally ‘drifting’ techniques to the tightest course on the F1 calendar. I could be doing that in a Subaru Impreza, a Lancia Delta Integrale or a Fiat 500.

One of the other tracks that becomes available when you reach a certain level of attainment is the Top Gear test track like we see on the TV. It is a lot of fun to drive and provides for lots of unexpected challenges. It took me 2 hours to win the VW camper van race which in turn unlocks the track for use in other modes. It’s amazing how the slowest vehicles make for the most difficult races to win – These races aren’t pretty, it’s almost impossible to avoid the bumper-car scenario but a lot of fun and very educational in terms of gaining driving skills. Here’s some HD video of someone winning that race

As part of the package, drivers are required to undergo license testing – basically a series of short tests starting from simple things like starting & stopping up to more complex driving techniques. The optimum is to achieve gold in each license, easier in the early tests but waaay hard as you progress through the licenses.

As you progress through the licenses and win races you will accumulate money and experience. As you gain more and more of these you will start to unlock further aspects of the game, faster cars, better tracks, vehicle tuning options etc etc. Now you can see how the game just gets deeper and deeper.

One of the cars that I unlocked very quickly was actually a car from the previous game the Nissan MM-r (yes it’s a Micra). This thing rocks! it’s really fast when compared to the standard vehicles and it has tremendous handling on corners. With this I managed to win every race – take this puppy onto the full Cape Ring track for a lot of fun.

There’s a bunch of stuff that I’m not even anywhere near yet but I’m in no hurry, I’m just enjoying the sensation of driving these cars and these tracks

Whilst there are many tracks, I’m a little disappointed that the full range of F1 circuits aren’t available in GT5. Of all the tracks, these f1 circuits are the most familiar to me and the ones that I have been watching for the past 20+ years with F1.

F1 2010

Of course all of that is put right with the F1 2010 game which contains all 19 tracks from the 2010 grand prix calendar in very-accurate architectural detail. If the tracks are all of the correct length and I’m driving the cars to within 5 seconds of the proper F1 car times then I’m pretty much matching the experience of a proper F1 driver. There is only one word that springs to mind – Terrifying!

Now I’ve watched hundreds of races and seen many onboard videos, I supposed I became somewhat blasé about the incredible speed, acceleration and braking but to drive the tracks in these cars and to have walls come at you at such speed is, well…terrifying. But what fun.

The F1 game has several modes. There’s a career mode that sees you undertake a number of F1 seasons with each race being run with 1 practise (60 mins), short qualifying (20 mins)and then the race itself (20% of full distance). This is where I’ll be spending my time shortly but for now I’m mostly in either time trials – how fast can you do a lap - or grands prix, 3 lap races with 24 cars.

I’m driving currently with all assists on, traction control, auto-braking, throttle control & visible driving line. Purists will say that it’s cheating, and yes it is of sorts, but for now I’m really enjoying the sensations of driving these cars at this speed in these hallowed places. Some of the tracks I don’t know so well like Bahrain or Malaysia and this mode really helps to get the track layout and racing line into the mind.

All of this is so much fun although I do find that I am struggling with driving cleanly, i.e. not taking people off at corners. Part of the problem is that the view from the cockpit is dead-ahead and there’s no peripheral vision. So whilst you think that you have the racing line, Alonso, Vettel or Kubica can be alongside and you end up cutting them up, sometimes you know because you get a bump or you spin out, but other times you’re unaware of the carnage you leave behind. I’ll have to watch for that when I start to play online.

What I have noticed (and maybe I’m just being paranoid) is that when you do pull an aggressive move that is more ‘cheeky’ than ‘legal’, the system seems to have a ‘retaliation’ feature; in that a corner or two later someone will bump you and cause a spin. When 1/10 second is a big difference, a spin on track adds 10 or more seconds to your time and your race is over – so the lesson is to drive assertively but cleanly.

These are simply my thought of both games after 3-4 days of playing (I spent 12+ hrs on each game the first day I had it!) I’m still familiarising myself with everything and feel like I’m just scratching the surface, especially with the F1 game. In the next day or so, I’m going to be taking off the throttle & braking assists & shifting to manual gearbox. I fully expect my lap times to become much slower – Thank goodness I don’t have to worry about blowing engines & gearboxes for real!

Initial impressions of both games are WOW! A big part of that has to be put down to my simply catching up with the current state of simulator racing but part of that has to be the games themselves. I think also that using the driving wheel and pedals makes the game interface & control so much easier, given that I’ve been driving for 25 years.

Just for comparison here’s someone driving a Honda Civic around Monaco – (I’m 15 seconds faster in my mini!)

And here’s the same track in F1 2010 – My best time so far is 1:18.60 – the good drivers are doing it in 1:13 which is around the speed of the real F1 cars – here’s a comparison video of real & the F1 game – as I said, terrifying!

Oh yeah, how did the F1 coffee table work out? well, it’s still largely the same design but for now is heavily padded. I wonder if Jenson Button suffers from ‘numb bum’

If you are a fan of driving or car racing and you have a PS3 then I’d say to run as fast as you can to your local game shop and get these two games – amazingly you can get the F1 2010 game pre-owned – I suspect that there are a number of people who just couldn’t handle it or don’t get it. I find that with F1 generally, people either totally get it or don’t get it at all. 

I’m totally got!