As with all good home-based projects it appears to have an ever evolving design
with a continually expanding development plan and a 'work to do list' which
never seems to get any shorter.One day it will be finished.
Those of you who have visited the Ambient Music System page before, will be
aware that there was little of substance because I felt that there were some
parts of the design which could be patentable.
I have now decided that it would not be possible to obtain a patent, and so the
project details are being published in the public domain, which is much
more preferable to keeping the project hidden in the dark.
A Patentable Innovation ?
The Ambient Music System is a rather strange project which makes a lot
of people step back and go, "Wow ! I'd love one of them", and a number of
people have suggested that the idea may be patentable.
I actively considered the option of patenting the Ambient Music System but ran
into two problems ...
- Cost
To undertake the lodging of a patent, and the associated costs of patent searches
to ensure such an invention is not covered by someone elses patent, is an
expensive business.
- Patentability
To be patentable the Ambient Music System needs to be acceptable as an
invention and, to be an invention, it must be both innovative and a non-obvious
step forward.
There are a number of reasons why this invention is not innovative
and an obvious step forward ...
Whilst it would be nice to have had a patentable invention that would have made
me lots of money; the Ambient Music System is nothing more than an application
of things that have been around for a long time that has been applied to use in
a bathroom.
In this respect, the Ambient Music System cannot be defined as being a
non-obvious step, although the concept is, I would maintain, innovative.
Reluctantly I have abandoned any hope of obtaining a patent on this
invention and have released the information on the design and
implementation into the public domain to ensure that no one else can claim
a patent on a similar invention that performs in the same way.
What is the Ambient Music System ?
The Ambient Music System that I am going to describe here is a system that
allows ambient music to be played in a bathroom whenever it is occupied ( at
various times of the day and under certain other conditions ).
The most important feature is that the playing of ambient music is
completely automatic with the detection of bathroom occupancy and the turning
on and off of ambient music being completely automated and controlled as an
autonomous system.
This is the next technological step up from dragging a radio or tape player
in to the bathroom with you.
Although the system can easily be used to play rock or other music ( The Mind
Blowing, Ear Deafening, Heavy Metal Music System ) it was designed to play
ambient music, which I wanted in my bathroom, so hence the title of this
project.
Historical background
My Ambient Music System idea has been around in many forms for a very long
time in many various guises.Here's a brief guide to its twenty five ( yes, twenty five ) year
history.
Initial inception
In the late sixties ( or perhaps early seventies ) someone developed an egg
shaped chair that was fitted with a quadraphonic speaker system to create a
personal environment in which to listen to quadraphonic music which was all
the rage at the time.
I had followed the development of quadraphonic sound at the time and was really
impressed by the concept; this is the Happy Hippy site after all. And I did
like the chair design.
The mid 70's
At school, in the mid-seventies, I was involved in an
arts project building a jungle collage to which I helped add a sound track of
various jungle style sound effects.
The idea of being able to take sounds from nature or generated sounds ( such as
the seagulls in Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene of the same period ) combined
with an ability to move these sounds in three dimensions to create an amazing
ambient effect in a suitable chair ( flash back time ) or even room occurred
to me.
Many various schemes using tens, or hundreds, of cheap cassette decks
with tape loops passed through my mind that were forgotten or discarded due
to cost, the fact that tape would wear out quickly or the complexity of
controlling such a system.
The early 90's
In the early nineties I happened to be passing the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde
Park, London, when a particular exhibit attracted my attention so I stopped
and investigated.
This was a kinetic sound sculpture of a circus type tent that
consisted only of the strings that would have been the edges of the surrounding
tent canvas with small speakers, fixed in upside down flower pots to make
them waterproof, at the top of wooden poles forming the tent base supports.
Each speaker was being fed a chopped part of a sound track such that,
from afar, it appeared that the tent contained a traditional fairground
music organ playing merrily away. Close by though; each speaker was only
giving out a short, "Squawk, squawk, squawk", sound.
Although I can't remember the name of the sculpture or the artist that created
it; I do remember thinking that this was the best piece of installation art
that I had every seen and spent over an hour captivated therein.
I came away from the exhibit thinking that this was something that indeed
needed emulating in some manner or form but nothing came of it at the time.
The mid 90's
In the mid-nineties I bought a house and all the previous ideas came
together as I thought about implementing a system whereby I could put these
ideas I had previously in to play in the bathroom; the ideal place to just
sit back or lay down and let kinetic sound sculpture wash over one self.
The readily available supply of CD players meant that tape loop systems with
their tape wear problems were a thing of the past and the release of a number
of cheap ambient music CD's for relaxation, doing what I had done at school as
an art project twenty years earlier, gave me a firm basis on the mechanics of
implementing some form of kinetic sculpture.
My previous, smouldering, artistic ideas jumped back to centre stage.
Having been pragmatic about what could and could not be done I decided that
just having ambient music CD's played in the bathroom would be a good idea and,
if these could be played automatically when the bathroom was occupied, that
would make it even better - the Ambient Music System project was thus reborn.
The late 90's
As the decade rolled on, various schemes, plans and ideas emerged on how to turn
the Ambient Music Sytem into a reality. A multi-disc CD player had been
purchased cheaply and could be used under manual control. The only components
missing were the central control system and interface parts.
A variety of control systems were designed, all of them being based upon a
single-chip microprocessor for ease of use. The
Microchip PIC looked promising for a
while but was difficult to develop with, requiring purpose built device
programmers to be purchased.
The Atmel AVR arrived on the scene, and soon
became renowned as 'The PIC killer'. Whilst incredibly easy to develop for,
requiring nothing more than a PC parallel port and some software, its lack of
availability in the UK brought about its early demise.
As the AVR design was shelved, Microchip introduced a new PIC, one with Flash
programmability, serial programming and, incredibly, facilities to allow
on-chip debugging. A variety of cheap, ready built development boards existed,
including those with LCD and bread-boarding facilities. It looked like the
control system was on the way to completion.
The interfacing to monitor entry and egress to the bathroom had been designed
early in the project and the power control for the CD player and the speaker
amplifier, although a little complex, had also neared finalisation.
Controlling the CD player had presented a few headaches; whether to control it
directly, wiring its keypad to relays, or add components so it would
automatically start when powered up, or to create an infra-red interface to
replace the remote control were all considered.
The project got bogged down in minor problems. How to safely switch the CD
player's mains power supply, how to modify the player, or get infra-red
working and how safe it would be to leave it switched on permanently.
With other interests taking up more time ( video documentary making for
instance ) and a lack of liesure time due to work related issues, the
project again slipped into the background.
The present
The Ambient Music System continued to gnaw at me; I was so close, but there
still seemed so much to do. The system was working manually, but no matter
how pragmatically I parred the system down to something minimal, just to
get it working, there was a lot of hardware to be built and software to
get running.
What I needed was a near zero-effort solution to the poblem.
Just as I decided to 'buckle-down' and 'get it sorted', I fortunately had a
flash of inspiration; rather than use a dedicated microprocessor, why not
use an old PC platform ? These were cheap and readily available, and an old
8086 or 80286 should be well up to the job. If nothing else, it meant that
it would be extremely easy to develop and debug code.
There would still be the problem of additional hardware, but I sat back to
think about this; was there a simple way of doing it ?
The answer was yes; why even bother with additional hardware ? PC's have had
music cards fitted for years now; why not use the CD player in the PC to play
back through the sound card ?
Indeed, why not copy the CD tracks to the hard disk and play from there ?
And, with MP3 having taken off, why not store compressed MP3's ripped from
the CD's; that's exactly what people are doing with their desktop PC's when
they use them at home and at work. In fact, everything needed is already
there.
A quick surf of the internet revealed there was open source software to play
audio ( .WAV ) files straight through a Sound Blaster card under MS-DOS and
it would be easy to wrap this code within the control system. Interfacing
to the entry sensors could be done through the Games Port on the sound card
and the loudspeakers could be permanently powered from the computer power
supply ( the speakers have a 'self power-off mode' when an input signal was
absent, or extremely low ).
The whole system has now been reduced to a single PC and some simple interface
wiring with the bulk of the project now software based. Everything necessary
was already lying around, waiting to be used.
As the new millennium arrived; the Ambient Music System finally entered its
implementation phase ...
