Pressure Project 2 – The Flipper
Posted: March 3, 2026 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Description
The Flipper is a TouchDesigner patch that uses an audio input to create video, and uses a video input to create audio. When used in a network this “cell-block” acts independently by creating entirely new audio and video, instead of just modifying the audio and video it receives. Its modularity lies in its ability to provide other users in the cell-block network with new sources of audio and video, that are themselves generated from other audio and video over the network.
Collective Documentation
Pending
Individual Documentation
Overview of my cell-block’s network. This is connected to three inputs and outputs on the outside of the container, which connect to other cell-blocks on the network. While there’s a lot on screen, it breaks down into a few simple sections.
This portion of the network takes in audio from over the patch through the in_audio CHOP. The envelope, math, and audioparaeq objects slow the stream of data and boost high frequencies, respectively. This then is turned into a spectrogram and is sent directly to a chopto TOP.
This portion processes that audio spectrum into a new visual. Starting in the bottom left, I use a series of TOPs to create a flow-like visual, which is then composited with the spectrum. This new visual is colored using a series of ramps and a look up TOP. The ramps are cycled through using either an LFO or an input from in_osc over the network. An example of the visuals this produces is below.
Lastly, this portion of the patch processes video received over the network from the in_video TOP (or in this case, a camera input) into audio. While I didn’t get quite as interesting an audio output as I wanted, I still think I was effective in transforming video to audio. The video that is received gets sent directly to a topto CHOP, which reads RGB values over the X and Y planes of the video. the following objects then reduce the amount of data, and turns those waves into a stereo audio signal by the merge CHOP. This wave is given an envelope by the math objects (I attempted to control this with another osc input but failed to make it work) and is sent out over the network. An example of audio is included below.
Reflection
Since I knew I wanted to flip the audio and video signals inside my patch, the independence of the cell-block was semi-inherent the entire time I was working on it. In order to ensure it was connectable with others, however, I needed to ensure that whatever the patch did was interesting enough, while still clearly using audio and video to influence the opposite output, so that it didn’t just seem like I was generating something entirely new.
I made choices about what to include and exclude primarily by trying to figure out what I could accomplish that was reasonably within my ability, but still interesting. For example, I’ve worked with spectrogram imagery in the past, so I knew I would be able to incorporate that the easiest. On the opposite end of that, I attempted to integrate FM synthesis into the audio part of my patch to get some more interesting sounds. However, with my inexperience in TouchDesigner, I found it really difficult to make FM work, so I chose to exclude it.
One thing that surprised me was how even if cell-blocks didn’t work “perfectly” together, they still were able to have some sort of interaction, even having unexplainable interactions. I was also a bit surprised how underutilized the OSC data we were sending was. I know I was personally having difficulty in doing something interesting with the OSC signals, but it was interesting that it was a widespread problem. I think this might come from the fact that the other signals we were working with were both very tangible. Since the OSC input was just a number, I think we were a bit less motivated to find an interesting way to use it, as opposed to the audio and video, which we could immediately do interesting things with.
I think we didn’t have quite enough time to experiment with combining our cell blocks in different ways for a lot of emergent behavior to emerge. But one that I enjoyed seeing was how the visuals would layer together through 2, 3 or 4 cell-blocks. I thought that all of the cell blocks were interesting on their own, but the most interesting visuals were created through the combination of several together. This relates to Halprin’s cell-block framework through the idea that we can each create our own module that does its own thing, but the most exciting behaviors only emerge once we begin to combine the different cell-blocks, and experiment with how they feed into each other.