A fellow artist at Jaaga, Tobias Rosenberger, said recently that the process of art creation should proceed intuitively, and not be manufactured from the outset. This idea resonated very soundly with me as my last two projects have been case studies which effectively prove his point.

Those experiences taught me a lot about creative process, which I'll come back to on another post. But on this current project, it's enough to say that I have purposefully avoided creating any kind of blueprint upfront. I have put anxieties over timing and achievement to one side and allowed the process to emerge naturally, even to the extent of what medium and which space to use.

When I arrived at Jaaga four weeks ago to begin my residency, the first thing I found out was that Jaaga - the building - was to move in June.

The owner of the land, Naresh, an architect and ultimately a businessman, had decided to develop what is a prime central Bangalore location. There was not (and still is not) a definite destination for the structure.

Continuing on from my introduction to ambisonics, I now want to find out more about ambisonics by exploring an implementation in Max/MSP.

Max doesn't natively have objects for ambisonics, so I googled for externals. There are a few results, but one of the better-looking ones (and as it happens, the first result) is published by a British academic named Graham Wakefield.

I've heard a little about ambisonics from sound artists, but now that we are going to attempt to use it at Jaaga, I decided to go back to basics. Here are the results.

Introduction
First, I searched Youtube for a gentle intro. This 'man-in-white-coat' video from the EBU is perfect. In it, the 3D sound concept behind ambisonics is introduced and discussed.

Surface is a light and sound installation created for Jaaga in 2010. It was created as a response to the space at Jaaga, which is constantly reforming and therefore constantly 'under construction'.

Jaaga is a space which is always populated with discarded materials - sheet metal, wire, wood and others. For the installation, nine planks of wood were selected, ranging from around 4ft - 9ft in height. I created a new 'skin' for the planks in the form of a generative light and sound installation. The aim was to bring the discarded, inanimate surfaces to life - causing them to be born, to live, and to die in a new guise.

I've been spending a lot of time today trying to figure out how best to connect the Servo motor we bought the other day. Unfortunately there isn't a NYU phys comp tutorial on driving servo motors with high voltages, which would have been ideal. I've had to learn a few new things, from a mixture of sources, and I'll pull the results together here.

The difference between standard geared motors and servo motors
So the first thing to understand is that a geared DC motor like the ones we used in the last couple of posts is quite dumb. It is directly controlled by the DC current you supply it via it's two inputs. You can only really tell it to start or stop. That's it.

Yesterday, we tested a fairly timid 5V DC Motor with Arduino, and I blogged about the experience of setting it up and figuring out the components.

Today we used exactly the same circuit, but switched to a more powerful 12V DC Motor which we picked up in SP Road for 175INR (£2.50). The only change we made was to switch up the variable power supply to 12V.