Pressure Project 2 (Maria)
Posted: February 27, 2021 Filed under: Maria B, Pressure Project 2 Leave a comment »After playing around with making a ‘graphite piano’ with the Makey Makey in class, I realized how fun creating sound through unique interactions was and wanted to try it out with the Leap Motion! The basic idea was to create a piano whose notes could be played by moving your hand back and forth through the air and had accompanying visuals for each note.
At first, I attempted to do a MIDI output from Isadora to play notes through a FL Studio plugin. I’ve never done anything with MIDI before so this was extremely confusing. I decided for the sake of time and usability on other people’s devices without additional software that it would be better to just import individual audio files. At first, I downloaded mp3 files but realized that Idadora interprets these as video files, and the functionality with video files is different than with audio files on Isadora. So I converted them to WAV files and Isadora was able to recognize them as sounds 🙂
I started with programming the sounds to go with my movement with the intent to add in the visuals after. I made individual user actors for each note (see photos below) that trigger the note upon entering a certain number range. (Question: Is there a way to automate the entering of sequential numbers into a series of actors? For example if I wanted the range of the first actor to be 0-100, the next one 100-200 and so on, is there a way to do that without entering in all the values individually?)
For whatever reason Isadora did not like what I was doing and decided to crash almost every time I tried to test it 🙁 I tried to change things around by adjusting the ranges to be wider (from 50 to 100) and tried putting the sounds on separate channels and not all on one. It didn’t change too much so I decided to build out the visuals separately so they could be played without the audio if I wasn’t able to get it to work during my presentation.
Similar to the sounds, I created a user actor with inputs I could use for the visual associated with each note. They were essentially randomly colored rectangles in a line that showed up when the right hand x pos was inside a specified range and dissapeared when it wasn’t. I had some fun figuring out how to finagle this using the comparator actor plugged into the bypass input of the shape. The output of the range actor was 1 when inside the range and 0 when outside the range, so connecting it straight to the bypass would make the bypass turn ON (turning the shape off) when I was inside the range, and I needed the opposite. I was able to set the comparator to send the ON, or 1, signal to the bypass (turning the shape off) when the output from the range actor was equal to zero!
I also set it so the color would change every time the shape appeared by plugging random triggers (activated when the value exited the range) into the values of a color-maker, that connected to a gate that was opened when the value entered the range.
I then went back to experimenting with the sound to see if I could get it to work any better, and found that it didn’t freeze quite as much if I added the sound inside each shape actor.
To top off the visuals, I added a TT Gamma Actor and a TT Grid Warp Actor that were influenced by the Y position of the right hand. It gave it a cool techno feel that I realized probably would’ve aesthetically fit better with a different sounding instrument, but figured it wasn’t worth it at that point to go back and change everything.
When it came to the in-class critique, there were still a few issues with crashing and Alex suggested I tried copying the scenes over into a fresh file to see if it would help. I did, and it didn’t do much, so there must just be something about the way I set up my actors that Isadora doesn’t like :/
Overall, this project got me really excited about the potential of sound in interactive experiences and has got me thinking about how I can take it further in the cycle projects!!