Syzygryd’s next showing has been announced for Insomniac Event’s Beyond Wonderland festival in Southern California on Saturday, March 19th.

Currently spending much of my time adding tweaks to code, fixing cabling issues, testing gear and general preparation for our setup.

Our first run of Syzygryd was a great success! Almost all of the systems we had designed worked as expected (especially without having a test run). A lot of the sound sets that were submitted by artists sounded wonderful and we were really greatly surprised by how much people enjoyed playing with them.

Overall, we had a great response. There wasn’t a moment during event week where the sculpture wasn’t being interacted with. We even had artists creating sets mid-week and had an interpretive dance group perform during a set.

Despite some challenges, I will still be involved heavily with the project and it’s future runs. Hopefully, from these runs we will also be able to improve upon our sound system and provide an even more rich environment for people to experience.

As far as the software aspect is concerned, we will be preparing the code base soon for public release so people can essentially build their own Syzygryd or just freely improve upon our code. I definitely look forward to seeing how the code evolves from our original implementation.

Early Syzygryd Concept Art rendered by Nicole

As of late, I’ve been occupying some of my free time with Syzygryd.  Syzygryd is a collaborative art project bound for Burning Man 2010 that allows people to create a musical piece that also controls LEDs and Fire.

I’ve mostly been contributing to the Music/Sound groups of the project and have to say have been very impressed with the amount of headway that we have made so far on the project.  Syzygryd utilizes it’s own OSC to MIDI converter, MIDI sequencer, and a touchscreen controlled grid sequencer (all written in Processing/Java!).

The project hasn’t been without hardships however.  One of the constantly arising questions is the balance between how much control should a musician or sound designer should have versus how much control should a grid sequencer operator have.  These are hurdles we constantly come across throughout the design process of the software, as well as some of the documentation we are developing for these future musician/sound designers to become involved with the project.

Overall, please check out Syzygryd‘s latest happenings on their blog.