Collidoscope¶

Collidoscope is an interactive, collaborative sound installation and musical instrument (granular synthesizer) that allows participants to seamlessly record, manipulate, explore and perform real-world sounds.
It is designed for both amateurs and professional musicians.

Collidoscope was created by Ben Bengler and Fiore Martin and it builds on on the research conducted at the Center for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London in real-time sound processing and synthesis, hardware design, physical computing, UI design, designing for interaction, accessibility and collaboration.

For latest news and updates, follow our twitter feed @opencollido

Contact Dr. Nick Bryan-Kinns: n.bryan-kinns@qmul.ac.uk

The granular synthesis engine is based on Ross Bencina's paper Implementing Real-Time Granular Synthesis, on the TGrains Unit Generator of the SuperCollider language and on the Cross-modal DAW Prototype developed in the EPSRC funded project Design Patterns for Inclusive Collaboration (DePIC)

Collidoscope was supported by the EPCRC Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) Platform Grant (EP/K009559/1), the EPSRC Design Patterns for Inclusive Collaboration (DePIC) grant (EP/J017205/1), and b00t Consultants Ltd (b00t).

This repository contains all you need to build your own Collidoscope unit.

The Downloads section contains:

• The software binary you need to run Collidoscope, released under the GPL version 3 license;
• An introduction guide to get you started with Collidoscope and to get an overview of its inner architecture;
• A guide on how to install the software or compile it yourself if you’d like to;
• A reference document on the MIDI messages used by the Collidoscope software;
• The 3D CAD files to build your own physical unit;
• Instructions for the physical build.

The Software Repository contains:

• The CollidoscopeApp source code, that runs the graphics and the audio engine. Released under the GPL version 3 license;
• The CollidoscopeTeensy source code, namely the software running on the Teensy microcontroller that turns the sensor data into MIDI messages for the CollidoscopeApp. Also released under the GPL version 3;
• The Printed Circuit Board that we used with the Teensy microcontroller to make it easier to plug/unplug the sensors to it.
  This is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0.