Latest interactive kiosk deployed today...

-
I'm deploying the latest interactive kiosk I've designed and set up for the new exhibit at the Mary and David Harrison Institute and Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. The interactive display is running a media player that visitors can use to select and listen to African tribal music. It's part of the larger Global Collections exhibit at the Harrison/Small Library. More information on the exhibit can be found here...Global Collections Exhibit

My major goal in this installation was to strip away the Windows desktop and replace it with a desk top with only the media player icon. The reason was so that I could achieve total lock down on the machine AND even after a reboot, only the media player with the current play list was available.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekend in the Studio

-
I had some good sessions in the studio this weekend. I didn't have much of a plan. I fired up drum machine and just jammed. One piece took shape on Saturday evening that started out as a retro-computer game sounding piece. But after writing the main melody riff on keyboard using a distorted analogue synth sound; I decided to find out what it sounded like played with an electric guitar. The piece suddenly took a turn into the realm of an anime soundtrack or something from a Power Rangers show. The riff was catchy and I ended up wanting to play it through several different amps and in different harmonies which ended up creating a huge wall of guitars. I may still go back and lay in some of the original analogue synth playing the melody. I brought in my 6 year old son to see what he thought of the song since it was the type of music and TV shows he watches. He loved it! Guess I'll need to download it to his music player. I don't like to pound away to much on one composition
Read more

Silverlight media creation

-
I spent much of today creating media to be played in a Silverlight player for the latest interactive kiosk in the Harrison Institute main gallery. This is v.2 of the kiosk. The aim of this version was to create a full screen player with a playlist that a user could navigate easily by touch. While Windows Media Player has big buttons for touch screens; the playlist is a little too tight for navigation by finger. Silverlight has some great tools built in that allow for large easy to navigate playlists. I also decided that I wanted some movment on the screen, but something that wouldn't seem out of place or distract the listener. I decided to create little movies based on slideshows using the cover art of the CD that the music was pulled from. Using the latest Windows Movie Maker software I created a neat little slidshow with fades and title FX. The slideshow was then imported into Expression Encoder 4 as many times as there were tracks. Then using the overlay feature each song video
Read more

Scoring short film "Dayplanner of the Dead"

-
Whew! Closing 2012 and opening 2013 was filled with lot's going on. In December I was contacted by Gary Streiner asking me if I was available to score a short film, "Dayplanner of the Dead", which just lost the original composer. Even though I was about to move into an new studio, I agreed to contact the director. The director sent me a rough cut of the film and some temp tracks. At first I wasn't sure I was the right composer for the job after listening to some temp tracks sent by the director; but I liked the film and I wanted to do a horror/comedy so I sent some samples of my usual stuff. After hearing my work he assured me that if I just went ahead and composed it my way it would sound great! So I accepted the gig and got to work. I wanted to stay with the flavor of the temp tracks. These tracks would remind one of a quirky haunted Appalachian  or haunting circus music. So I locked on to some key instruments like a dulcimer, snare drum, brass, piano and violin;
Read more