Lots of work has gone into getting the Vocal Migrations technology up and running by Matt Olden and Tarim at the studio. I got hold of 6 Raspberry Pi Computers (with still a few more on order)… not as easy as it sounds! - they have been extremely in demand since their release with long waits on orders.. thankfully that has calmed down now and it's fairly easy to get them.

So far, Matt Olden has focussed on getting Pd extended running well on the Pi, programming Pd Patches and experimenting with various soundcards and peripherals, whilst Tarim has been working with sensors using an Arduino and programmed code to make specific Pd objects so the arduino interfaces well with Pd running on a Pi. … so far, this is all going pretty smoothly, and we now have the Pi and Arduino running a Pd patch where sound is changed using a sonar distance sensor... !! There have been a few hurdles on the way, which are being ironed out pretty quickly - and, in general everything is developing very fast on the Raspberry Pi front, with a steady stream of updates and changes to operating systems and firmware for the Pi.

The next stage is to find the best distance sensor to use.  So far, sonar sensors are behaving quite well, but we are concerned that too many of them in the same space may cause a lot of interference, so I have got hold of a variety of different beam widths and ranges, and will be testing these out over the next few days. I’ve also got some IR sensors, but the range is a bit too short, and the longer range ones don’t’ seem to be available any more.... so, fingers crossed...

If the sensors do interfere with each other too much – I wonder if it is possible to add a ‘strangeness filter’ ? – In fact, this is already in place to a certain degree because the data from the sensor is being smoothed, in order to ignore any ‘strange’ results – and to just use the data that ‘makes sense’.... already the biomimicry kicks in !