It was very exciting for onShore to do this job within this artistic and creative environment.

The CSO could not have been a better client to work for. They were not only extremely positive and encouraging, they were always generating excitement. They were also extremely competent and never resisted carrying their end of the bargain.

On top of it all, they were always big believers in doing it the right way. On day one, they hired top notch people, ESI, to produce the most detailed functional spec I have ever seen, and they were not afraid to get through a difficult and grueling bidding process. When we suggested ways to cut features to bring our estimates into line with their budget, they scoffed at the ideas. They really wanted it to be world-class, just like the Symphony Center. They would not accept compromises and only sought to make this project at least as good as the specs if not better.

Their attitude was wonderful to deal with. It is as if they considered us one of their family. They are truly deserving of a great deal of respect in this city and around the world.

I must say that to be employed by an entity like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to make musical instruments is very flattering.

We were very excited and pleased with the jobs done by our fellow team members on this project: the work that CSSI did creating the physical instruments, all of the graphical elements produced by _____ Communications, and by the work of Kandu. We love the sound rooms.

Kandu did a great job with software design. Theirs was a much different approach than ours. They appear to have viewed the project like game programming for one specific platform. We deal more with the middle layers and operating systems of the variety of machines we find before us. We normally tend to think in terms of enterprise applications. We must reuse our code more often so that it can "talk" to systems that we don´t have control over. Our jobs often require us to modify code as well as pass it on to other people, like IS/IT professionals.

1. Aside from the 8 spares, all of the boards are built.
2. Many have problems, but using the scope Lee and I are batting 1.0 getting them to work (4/4 this evening). Should have bought this 6 months ago, too bad. There is full documentation for the troubleshooting procedure in cvs.
3. There are final 'air' box mounting issues to be resolved. Should be put in the coffin by #4...
4. A calibration program is half complete and should be operational by the weekend.
5. Program changes need to be made to support pressure control on the 'percussive' boxes, i.e. block and drum, which is a day's work and 1 or 2 interchanges with Kandu.
6. There is a tentative monday am meeting with Erik L et al. to discuss calibration/response issues.
7. What else?

We had fun and learned a lot from this project and we would do it again in a minute. We found out that there is great potential in a new and wide open market called "embedded technology."

If we could do it again, we would try to find ways to move digital audio data across to the different speaker systems. I believe the network is solid now, but it would be more robust if it was moving over a single set of network wires. Also, the sound studios have synthesizers, mixers, keyboards, microphones, and a mini-disk recorder, but it would have been fun to install a computer editing station to give a hands-on view of a more modern digital studio, although the place is very good as it is.

We would have loved to create more, unique musical instruments. I´ve made some for my own band, so to do this for a client would have been wonderful. My personal experience is designing Frankenstein instruments made up of parts from old guitars and tape decks. That sounds funny, but it means that I´ve learned a lot the hard way and I´ve translated it to solid experience.

Now that it´s over, we would like to take this project to the next level - take it to the Internet. The activity boxes are designed to be independent MIDI musical instruments; i.e., they could plug into a keyboard and control it. This instrument is already talking native MIDI. We wrote a program for the microprocessor built into the activity boxes that packages the velocity and note information directly into MIDI packets instead of just sending raw binary analog data when you press buttons on the instruments. Connecting this signal to a computer means it can be played over the Internet. This was unanticipated by ESI´s design and really opened up possibilities. We can be freed up to, for example, take this concept to classrooms in Chicago Public schools so that sessions in the classrooms will feed back to the server in the Echo Center that compiles all the lessons that all the different students would be taking. Their music could interact with the music written for the CSO. Once on the Internet the schools might just as easily be in Japan as in Chicago.