The first prototypes were non-controllers. I put on videos of StepMania and tried to play along by hitting things with my hands in various configurations just to see what configurations worked. My initial idea was to have things in front of me, behind me, and to both sides. So I put things in those places to hit and tried it out. Hitting the one behind me without taking my eyes off the screen was a bit too difficult for me though. Next I thought of a compressed 4 panel pad layout that could be put on a desk/table, where the up and down panels are adjacent and the side panels are on either side of them. (See picture of final pad below for that layout.) So I put 4 pieces of paper on my desk like that and tried that out. It was fun, so on to the next step of making a controller.

The controller prototype was a jumble of assorted parts I already had on hand (pun intended) to test out that I could get a controller working. Cardboard base, lots of tape (both duct tape and double-sided carpet tape), some speaker wire, aluminum foil, paper plates for the panels, and an already-programmed microcontroller than I took out of a broken commercial dance pad. The large central piece of aluminum foil is wired up to ground, each small piece of aluminum foil next to it is wired up to an arrow, and the aluminum foil taped to the paper plates connects the other two pieces when the plate is pressed. As a dance pad it was pretty terrible, but it worked well enough to move on to the next step of making something hopefully playable.

The “final” (quotes because it might well need some adjustments with more use) hand dance pad is a little less of a mess, but only a little. The base is 26″×16″×¼″ plywood with duct tape to prevent splinters on the edges and corners. The panels are 8″×10″×0.02″ polycarbonate sheets. I used carpet tape to attach aluminum foil to the base under all 4 panels, and copper tape to join the pieces of foil. Adhesive felt floor protectors hold the corners of the panels up off the base. (Not because I think that’s ideal, but because I already had them and it seemed like they would work.) More double sided tape attaches foil to the panels and the panels to the floor protectors. Each of the 5 pieces of foil is connected to the microcontroller with copper tape holding speaker wire to the foil, then more copper tape holding the other end of the wire to the microcontroller. (I’m not great at soldering.) Then I wrapped all of the exposed copper tape on the microcontroller in electrical tape, and duct taped the whole thing down to an unused part of the base above the right panel. The first round of testing revealed way too many false positives, so I doubled up the floor protectors at the corners. Second round of testing went better, but occasionally a panel would still get stuck on, so I added more floor protectors along the long edges of the panels. Same thing again, so more floor protectors along the short edges. So far that seems to be working and I haven’t had any more issues yet.

If I did this again, I’d probably use thicker plywood and polycarbonate panels, but it seems to function well enough, and it’s fun to play. Maybe not as fun as a normal foot-operated dance pad, but an interesting change of pace.

Edit 2022-10-02: Playing with this on my desk was shaking my desk and knocking things over, so I taped some old holey socks to the bottom, which seems to have fixed the problem.

At a very basic level, both a camera lens and a brass instrument are tubes. In the case of the camera lens, there’s usually some refractive material like glass inside the tube. In the case of the brass instrument, the tube is often folded up and might have valves or a slide to modify the length of the tube. There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the basic idea. Now, since these two things are basically just tubes, can they be combined into a single device that serves both purposes? Yes. Should they be combined? No.

This project started with 3 large cardboard tubes. I cut one open so it could fit around the other two, and used it to join them end-to-end (3253mm). Then I painted the insides of the two main tubes black to reduce reflections when used as a camera lens. On one end, there’s a filter thread reverse mount adapter and a series of filter thread step-down adapters. The mount adapter can be attached to my camera to use the tube as a lens, or I can use it as the mouthpiece of a brass instrument. The step-down adapters form a cone to connect the mount adapter to the tube. At the other end, there’s a removable piece of aluminum foil with a small pinhole in it (3/32″ diameter). With the pinhole in place, the whole assembly blocks enough light to serve as a ridiculously long pinhole lens. With the pinhole removed, air can flow through to serve as a ridiculously bad brass instrument. (Note that the pinhole is off-center in the picture because the tube wasn’t perfectly straight. I tried to align the pinhole with the center of the lens mount.)

So without further ado, I’d like to introduce my latest single, Long-Focus Pinhole Lens and Brass Instrument. The cover art is an image of some tree branches in front of a cloud in front of the sun, taken with the pinhole lens. The audio is my attempts to play the brass instrument.

And now I know. A combination lens and brass instrument is not the most practical idea.

Cipher Suite no. 1, Fs PSK_PBKDF2_SNOW_HMAC, “Deprecated” (music video, sheet music) is my attempt to turn a cipher suite into a suite of dance music based on the cryptographic algorithms. In Pavane for a Pre‐Shared Key, Alice (clarinet) and Bob (violin) are in perfect sync throughout a slow and formal key agreement (dance). For the Password‐Based Key Derivation Function Two‐Step, cryptographic key derivation is represented by frequent musical key changes. Sometimes Alice derives new keys from a secret; sometimes Bob does; sometimes they both derive the same keys from the same secret. Once data encryption key(s) are available, Alice and Bob can start sending encrypted messages using a stream cipher, in Snoa in the SNOW. As they go through the ciphertexts in this dance music, they frequently lose synchronization, but they recover each time. Finally, they authenticate their messages with a Hash‐Based Message Authentication Zwiefacher. The zwiefacher’s formula is (PPWWP)²: initialize inner hash (pivot), XOR with inner pad (pivot), update inner hash with K′ XOR inner pad (waltz), update inner hash with message (waltz), finalize inner hash (pivot), initialize outer hash (pivot), XOR with outer pad (pivot), update outer hash with K′ XOR outer pad (waltz), update outer hash with inner hash result (waltz), finalize outer hash (pivot).

Morse Code Suite no. 1, Fs 1865 (music video, sheet music) comes from my realization a while ago that I really like the sound of International Morse Code’s rhythm, and my inability to find any music with that rhythm. (There is plenty of music that incorporates Morse code, but I didn’t find any that used standard timings for a significant portion of the tune.)

Piano Axioms Suite no. 1, Fs ℕ (music video, sheet music) exists because I saw an unfulfilled mathematical pun opportunity in the name of the Peano axioms (a.k.a., Peano postulates). In each of the five axioms/postulates/movements, rests represent zero and successive notes represent successive natural numbers.

Finally, because vuvuzelas amuse me, I arranged Morse Code Suite no. 1 for Solo Vuvuzela, Fs 1865‽ (music video, sheet music). It sounds pretty bad, but that’s definitely the point.

Get the album today (or tomorrow, or not at all, who am I to tell you what to do?) on Bandcamp.