Pressure Project #2: Playlist

Posted: October 23, 2026 | Author: Jules Rains | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Pressure Project |Leave a comment

For this pressure project, I decided to make a hand-controlled playlist. Upon loading into the patch, the user is faced with themselves, with a pixelated filter on top and four album covers floating above their head. If the user holds up 1 to 4 fingers, a song will play for each respective finger. When a song is selected, the album art for that song will come to the center, spin, and bob up and down to signify that it is selected.

The songs used, in order from left to right: Backseat by Balu Brigade, When I’m Small by Phantogram, Sugar We’re Going Down by Fall Out Boy, Fireflies by Owl City

When I first started brainstorming for this assignment, I knew I wanted to keep doing stuff with music. My first struggle was thinking of something that could be done entirely without touching the computer. My first idea was for a song to play just when a person looked at the screen. I created a patch that played Sexyback by Justin Timberlake whenever both my eyes were visible on screen. While I thought it was funny, the experience was very short, and there was no real mystery revealed.

The mystery aspect came second to me in my thinking overall since my first concern was getting my ideas to work. When I came up with the finger-selected song idea, it felt possible but still challenging. With some Google searches on “How to trigger audio file when putting up finger MediaPipe TouchDesigner,” I was able to get a basic system set up with a base null, then two selects (one for finger tip, one for knuckle), a merge, then a logic. With that, I copied it for all four fingers, then merged them all together again. Long story short, I got the finger song system to work. That was honestly the easy part. The albums were the more confusing part. After a lot of trial and error, I decided to keep the albums visible the whole time to give a hint to the user that the patch was song-based and there were four options. The mystery aspect was discovering what triggered which song.

I was asked during my presentation, “Why is it pixelated?” and there isn’t really a cool answer. After a couple of hours of just staring at myself, I got annoyed with picking apart my appearance and thought overall the patch would look cooler with a filter over it. The filter is a pixelation filter with the bloom filter on top.

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