Wearable Beats

This workshop will serve as an introduction to soft circuits, to learn how to translate your circuits into wearable projects and create your own soft controllers for visuals or audio.

Wearable Beats are soft control for your visual & sonic experiments.

Soft circuits, or electronic textiles, are electrical circuits created using flexible conductive materials such as conductive threads and fabrics altogether with discrete electronic components. We will provide basic knowledge and possible applications for these materials to let the users explore new ways of electronics and design, using Processing as a software. 

This class is oriented to performers, musicians or visual artists that want to explore new ways to build their own instruments or controllers that can turn into a wearable piece. We will divide this course in two sessions of 4 hours each. We will build a soft controller to play with analog circuits, Arduino and Processing.  

In the first session we will learn about the specifics of the new materials used in the class and how to work with them to create basic components for our circuits, such as switches, pressure sensors or potentiometers. We will work then altogether to build a simple synthesizer where we will mix those soft components with discrete ones and the intricacies of how to connect soft and hard components.  

The second session we will teach how to use the soft­controller that we built the day before to command an application with visuals and sound that we will code with Processing. 

In order to do this we will connect the soft­controller to an arduino and learn initially how to read and manage the different readings that come from our soft materials. The following step will be sending the data to Processing and learning how to translate those numbers in parameters that manipulate an application with sound and visuals.

Hardware Requirements:  

• An Arduino and other components will be required in order to build the controller .Here is a link to buy an Arduino Uno (if your have another version this also would work) 
• Sparkfun: www.sparkfun.com/products/11021 ­ 
• Adafruit: www.adafruit.com/products/50 
• Other components are included with the kits. 

Software Requirements:   

• Participants will need to bring their own computer with Arduino and Processing IDE installed (both free).
• Download Arduino IDE: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software 
• Download Processing IDE: https://processing.org/download/?processing