Summer NAMM has been occupying us at Gearwire for a couple weeks, but right now we're going to take a break and return to Casey Farina's Project CONDOR. As you recall, Farina is a doctoral student at Northwestern University. He put together an event that involved floating about ten giant blimps - each equipped with speakers, motors and bluetooth receivers - around Chicago's giant Broadway Armory.

In this installment, Casey walks us through how they created the whole setup; including directing the audio and controlling the blimps. The tupperware blimp gondolas don't necessarily look all that impressive at first, but they're filled with hacked hardware. Each blimp has a Motorola bluetooth receiver, and a Texas Instruments Class D amplifier. Everything was chosen not only for its performance, but obviously for its relative weight, since at the end of the day everything had to float.

Casey explains how they used a MIDI controller (designed for a modular synth) to convert the control voltage to move the blimps. It was a kind of control, anyway, since the team also had to deal with spin and the fact that the blimps weren't floating in a vacuum.

It was an intriguing evening, with all of Casey's friends, passers-by and random local kids who had stopped by the Armory to play basketball, but instead walked into a sound experiment. That's neighborhood art at its best.

Hear all the details in the Gearwire video.