Pressure Project 3: Only the Lonely

For the third pressure project involving dice, I wanted the dice to trigger a music player, with the location of where dice landed determining which instrumental parts of a song would play. I decided to use a Kinect’s depth sensor to detect the presence of dice in the foreground, mid-ground and background of a marked range of space.

I made origami cubes to use as dice so that they were a bit larger and easy to detect and also not as volatile and thereby easier to keep within the range I’d set.

Using a Syphon Receiver in communication with Vuo, I connected the computer vision to 3 discrete ranges of depth and used a crop actor to cut out any information about objects, like people, that might come into the camera’s field of vision.
(This only partially worked and could use some fine tuning). In retrospect, I wonder if there is an adjustment on Eyes ++ I could use to require the presence of an object to last a certain amount of time before registering its brightness in order to prevent interfering messages besides the location of dice. 

Each Eyes actor was connected to a smoother and an inside range actor which looked for the brightness detected within the set luminescent range for each one to reach a minimum in order to trigger a series of signals. The primary signal was to play that sections sound (because the brightness indicated an object present) or to stop it (because below minimum brightness indicated the absence of an object).

Because the three instrumental music files were designed to play together, it was possible for 3 dice to land in the 3 respective ranges, with the goal being that all three files started together, playing a song with drums, bass line and keyboard melody (reminiscent of Roy Orbison’s Only the Lonely). To make this work and not have the sound files start in split seconds of each others, I set up a system of simultaneity actors, trigger delays and gates, that I can’t actually explain in detail, but I understand conceptually as delaying action to look first for simultaneous presence of objects in multiple ranges, then sending a signal for 2 or all based on information gathered, and barring that, continuing signals through for an individual part to play.

For example, if a dice landed in the mid-ground and 2 in the foreground, the inside range enter triggers from both those ranges would send triggers to individual trigger delays that in 2 seconds send a message to play a single file. BUT, if the simultaneity actor for the mid-ground and foreground is triggered, it signals a gate to turn off on those two delays, preventing the individual file triggers and sending a shared trigger to both the bass and the piano files to start at the same time.

For whatever reason I can only get a zip file of garageband file to upload, but this is all 3 parts together: dice-player-band

The entire Isadora patch is here: http://osu.box.com/s/eyjn9zge850ywc81yhdoj4cpbic1rkka

Chance music….