Students/Jose Lopez
Jose Lopez 3rd year ICAM student at the University of California San Diego. I am a student that has explored many art forms through my education. Though out high school and college I joined several music groups. I have been in a Mariachi, Steel Drum Island Band, Afro Cuban Latin Jazz Band, African Drum Band,and a Jazz improve band. I've also been in a couple rock bands Distorted Reality, The Icons, and I'm currently in The Leefs. In Southwestern College I was a commercial music major where I learned recording techniques with Platinum, Gold Record, and Grammy winning engineer Jay Henry. Jay's worked with Baby Face, Cristina Aguilera, LLCoolJ, and Public Enemy. While I studied in Herny's Studio I got to record local band and International Artist. I Transferred to CalStateLA to continue my education in Commercial Music but quickly figured they had a very bad commercial music program. So I transferred back to SWC where I started taking courses in graphic and web design and I recently transferred to UCSD into the ICAM major. Which can involve both visual and audio arts.
Right now I work at the SIO's Earth Guide creating Flash based educational programs for students K-12 and sometimes college and I practice with my band on the weekends.
I don't have too much experience messing with electronics. The only type of capacitor I know of is a Flux capacitor and I think that only works with 1.21 giga watts and if you don't have a DeLorean that could reach 88, forget it. I have very little soldering evperience my electric guitar and my amps but that was just to attach something that was already previously attached. I've checked out some videos on youtube about sound bending and crating guitar effects. In this class I'd like to crate something crazy I could use with my electric guitar.
Midterm
Lovely Gutter:
(some parts of the circuit will be waterproof)
My idea is to use the rain as a switch and at the same time convert something with an ugly rep (the gutter) to something lovely.
First I would attach a funnel to a gutter. Within the funnel there will be 2 or more color lights. I'm not sure how many yet. The lights will shine down on the rain captured and escaping the funnel. This will be a broken circuit and will convert to a single or a double circuit depending on how hard it's raining. The rain will run out of the funnel and into the first smaller, metallic like funnel that will be attached to the positive end of the circuit. Then, depending on the strength of the rain it will complete a circuit by it reaching one or two other small, metallic funnels that are attached to the a wires that run to their corresponding lights, then to the negative end of the circuit.
This will be possible because of the nature of water. The hydrogen atom's attraction toward each other will keep the water together, depending on the amount and the velocity, creating the bridge to complete the circuit.
Lovely Gutter: (CANCELED)
In Tune With Nature
After attempting my Lovely Gutter project and failing over and over again because I still lack knowledge of electronics. I created an other project called In tune with nature.The Idea is to basically "hack" my old guitar tune, hook it up to a relay that will allow the current of a lamp that will be providing light to a small palm plant only when a guitar string, in tune is strum. The switch portion would be the guitar strings which will vibrating and releasing a frequency that activated the tuner.
Here's a pic:
Final
Momento This will be a simple performance piece. Named after the song I will be playing. I will be playing my guitar in a hopefully pitch dark room and the observers (you guys) will be given a flash light. The closer the observers get to the performer (me) the harder it will be to hear me. I am commenting on the image taking over music so much that artist in order to be heard they need to either look extremely beautiful or outrageously shocking like lady gaga and how people tend to observe this world mainly on the visual end and don't stop hear the sound, smell the roses, taste the wine, feel the warmth of the sun, don't focus on their other senses as much as they do sight. Although I'm only really showing the sound side I hope I get my message across. I will be placing the freeduino programed with code to create a sound that varies in pitch and amps depending on the resistance, that's where the photo-resistor comes in. It will be attached on the hole of the guitar and once the observer shines the light on it, it will create a sound the closer you guys get to me the loader and harder to listen to my music but the clear you all will be able to see me. In order to actually hear the song all the class has to do is give up the visible, turn off the light. I've been playing the guitar for 10 year and because I've spent so much time next to amps I actually feel pain from extremely high frequencies so in actuality the class will be hurting the artist, me the closer the get to me.
Process:
this is the same as the pitch follower program in the digital examples but I reclibrated it to the streamlight stingerXT a very powerful 100 dollar flash light, well back when I bought it, but the flash light broke 2 hours before the final and so I had to buy a cheap one at CVS. I changes the anologread from 0 to 1 and the out put from 8 to 9 and I messed around with the sensor reading till it was calibrated to work with the stingerXT I was able to control when it activated according to distance and I changed the range so it could go from very low frequencies to very hi.
