FAST, the EPSRC-funded research project that has supported the creation and study of Carolan over the past five years, draws to a close in December. The project team met at Queen Mary’s weird and wonderful Neuron Pod learning and community space for a final day of talks and demonstrations.

Carolan was in attendance too, including demonstrating its new Muzicodes feature where you can trigger its memories by playing melodies on it (see Post 61).

However, Steve couldn’t attend himself and so took the opportunity to record a video greeting for everyone on Carolan. It’s called the FAST blues …

This also provided a further opportunity to play with recording the view from inside Carolan. We’d first tried deploying time-lapse, still-image cameras inside Carolan back in Post 46 with intriguing results. This time we used a GoPro Hero 4 video camera to capture video and audio from inside our guitar. We found the internal sound to be bassy and woody, but somehow satisfying too. The final mix then combines this with the sound from Blue Yeti USB microphone positioned outside Carolan (you can see it in the image above) to capture Steve’s voice along with a more conventional guitar sound.