Sound Circle - Interactive projection & sound, MaxMSP

In contrast to the meandering development of my first MDDN221 project, “cPU”, “Sound Circle” was very focused, and very technically specific right from the start. I knew exactly what I wanted to do and how the program would work. The challenge I faced was fitting my conventional programming ideas into Cycling ’74s Max/MSP and it’s rather unique approach to programming.

A multi-point camera tracking system allows users to interface with 100 points of a circle. Manipulation of the circle’s points translates directly to samples of a 100 sample waveform (each circle point represents one sample). Made using MaxMSP 5.

The story

Around the start of this project, I had become particularly fond of chip-tune tracking (that’s a fancy name for making 8-bit music or ‘old video game music’ if you will). In my tracker of choice, ‘instruments’ are primarily created by drawing waveforms with the mouse onto a canvas of a set number of samples.

Essentially, what I did with this project was to take the two ends of that 100 point line and join them together. The circle’s radius is specifed, and any deviation from that is amplitude. Once I had this, all I did was plug in the the multi-point tracking program from my previous MDDN221 project. The sound could have been refined, however the project as a whole worked on a rudimentary level.

This project also drew inspiration from the project SUB_TRAKT by Anne Niemetz and Holger Foerterer where multiple users interacted separately, but influenced one ‘big picture’.