Making Music Tools

Creative Technology | Maxim Safioulline | Media Design Practices

Physical Computing | Interactive Design | Systems Prototyping

Tools: Basics of electricity, sensors, actuators, microcontrollers. Analog/digital read-write operations, potentiometer, button, JavaScript, Arduino, Processing, Projector

Role: self-directed

Experiment with creating different patterns of blinking LED. You can use Morse code, you can try to recreate a musical rhythm, or any other familiar patters. Use buttons and potentiometers to modify and control the execution of your code.

Create a system that allows you to play music (and possibly video) from your computer using a physical custom interface of your own design and creation. Will you make it for your own personal use or more general, usable by a larger group of people? Is it mean for solo performance or multiple people? Will it be specific to a genre of music? How do you select the parameters that you can manipulate

Process:

Construction of the hardware:

Place the two buttons and two potentiometers on the breadboard. Follow the Arduino connection manual to figure out how each sensor should be connected to ground, power, and a port. Sketch the code in Arduino:

• The buttons as digital reads and inputs.

• The potentiometers as analogue reads and inputs.

Construction of the interface:

Input the digital connection of the Arduino hardware and the audio files into Processing. Sketch out the loop for the audio files to be play while button is held down (equal to 1) and pause when the button is not pressed. The second button will switch the current song to the next song in the array list. One potentiometer changes the rate of the song being played, the second potentiometer changes the wetness of the delay of the song being played. The values from the Arduino ports are mapped onto the values of the rate and the delay.

Visually, the potentiometer that changes the rate alters the hue values of the image, and the potentiometer that changes the delay alters the saturation values of the image. The button that is in control of play/pause changes the quantitative values of the inner image as well as the rotation of the image.