Final Project Documentation: The Wobble Box 2.0

Arduino,Assignment,Audio,Final Project,Instrument,Max,Sensors,Software — Tags: — Jake Berntsen @ 9:46 pm

Presenting my original “wobble box” to the class and Ali’s guests was a valuable experience.  The criticisms I received were relatively consistent, and I have summarized them to the best of my ability below:

  • The box cannot be used to create music as an independent object.  When I performed for the class at the critique, I was using an Akai APC40 alongside the wobble box.  I was using the APC to launch musical ideas that would then be altered using the wobble box, which I had synced to a variety of audio effects.  The complaint here was that it was unclear exactly how much I was doing to create what the audience was hearing in real time, and very clear that I wasn’t controlling 100% of the noises coming out of my computer.  At any rate, it was impossible to trigger midi notes using the wobble box, which meant the melody had to come from an external source.
  • The box only has one axis to play with.  At the time of the critique, the wobble box only had one working distance sensor attached to the Teensy, which meant I could only control one parameter at a time with my hand.  Many spectators commented that it seemed logical to have at least two, allowing me to get more sounds out of various hand motions, or even using two hands at once.
  • The box doesn’t look any particular way, and isn’t built particularly well.  The wobble box was much bigger than it needed to be to fit the parts inside it, and little to no thought went into the design and placement of the sensors.  It was sometimes difficult to know exactly when it was working or not, and some of the connections weren’t very stable.  Furthermore, the mini-USB plug on the side of the device sometimes moved around when you tried to plug in the cord.

In the interested of addressing the concerns above, I completely redesigned the wobble box, abandoning the old prototype for a new model.

IMG_1636 The most obviously improved element of the new box is the design.  Now that I knew exactly what the necessary electronic parts were, I removed all the extra space in the box.  The new design conserves about three square inches of space, and the holes cut for the distance sensors are much neater.

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I applied three layers of surface treatment; a green primer, a metallic overcoat, and a clear glaze.  The result is a luminescent coloring, and a rubber-esque texture that prevents the box from sliding around when placed on a wooden surface.  In my opinion, it looks nice.

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A strong LED light was placed exactly in between the two distance sensors, illuminating the ideal place for the user to put his/her hand.  This also provides a clue for the audience, making it more clear exactly what the functionality of the box is by illuminating the hand of the user.  The effect can be rather eery in dark rooms.  Perhaps most importantly, it indicates that the Teensy micro-controller has been recognized by Max, a feature lacking in the last prototype.  This saved me many headaches the second time around.

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The new box has two new distance sensors, with differing ranges.  One transmits very fine values between about 2 inches and 10 inches, the other larger values between about 4 and 18 inches.  Staggering the ranges like this allows for a whole new world of control for the user, such as tilting the hand from front to back, using two hands with complete independence, etc.

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Finally, I moved the entire USB connection to the interior of the device, electing to instead just create a hole for the cord to come out.  After then securing the Teensy within the box, the connection was much stronger than it was in the previous prototype.

In addition to fixing the hardware, I created a few new software environments between Max and Ableton that allow for more expressive use of the box.  The first environment utilized both Max and Ableton Live to create an interactive art piece.  As the user stimulated the two distance sensors, a video captured by the laptop camera would be distorted along with an audio track of the user talking into the computer microphone.  Moving forward, my goals were to extend the ability to use the box as a true instrument, by granting a way to trigger pitches using only the box and a computer.  To achieve this, I wrote a max for live patch that corresponds a note sequence-stepper with a microphone.  Every time the volume of the signal picked up by the microphone exceeds a certain threshold, the melody goes forward by one step.  Using this, the user can simply snap or clap to progress the melody, while using the box to control the timbre of the sound.  I then randomized the melody so that it selected random notes from specific scales, as to allow for improvisation.  The final software environment I wrote, shown below, allows for the user to trigger notes using a midi keyboard, and affect the sounds in a variety of ways using the box.  For the sake of exhibiting how this method can be combined with any hardware the user desires, I create a few sounds on an APC40 that I then manipulate with the box.

Final Project “ImSound”: Ding

Audio,Final Project,OpenCV — Ding Xu @ 9:31 pm

ImSound: Record/Find your sounds in images

We run into a lot of sounds in our lives and sometimes we will naturally come up with certain color with those sounds. We may even form a memory of our city or living environment with some interesting sounds and colors. As for me, when I listen to some fast and happy tempo I could sense a color of dark red and when I run into some soft music, I may feel it is green or blue. Different people may have different feeling about different sounds. Therefore, ImSound is a devices aiming to encourage people collecting useless sounds in lives, all kinds of noise for example, convert them to certain colors based on their understanding and play the similar mixed sounds when run into a new image. The process stems from sound to image and then to sound.

For the user himself/herself, this device may help him/her convert some useless or even annoying sounds into some interesting funny sounds and  find new information from it. As for others, this devices is like a business card of a user’s specific understanding about the world’s sounds and share to others.

Hardware improvement:

Based on last time’s feedback, people failed to get aware of the focus when capturing an image. Thus, in the final prototype, I use a magnifier attaching a camera and a mic as a portable capture device for people to focus where the sound and where they will capture an image, with a metaphor of finding sounds in our lives. Instead of several buttons to control the recording and taking image, a single push button in the handle of magnifier is used to trigger taking a photo and then automatically record a 3s sound.

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Final2

Software improvement:

Instead of using the whole histogram of images, I converted the image from RGB to HSV and used the H value for histograms with 12 bins (variable). That is to say, the images will be divided into 12 clusters based on their major color. Each image is classified and the sound will be recorded into corresponding track contributing to the library of that color. That is to say, every color has a soundtrack which belong to this cluster. Then a granular analysis is used to divided the sound into small grains and remix them for a new sound of that class. When changing to the play mode, the H histogram is computed and the corresponding sound will be played.

I used a OF ofxMaxim with FFT processing for granular analysis, but the output sound effect is not that good. The speed of sound is changed but without much similar grains connecting together. This is a main aspect I should improve for the next step of this project.

 Demo Video:

Future Plan:

1. the most important is to get more in-depth granular analysis to re-mix the sounds. My current thought is to combine the grains with their similarities among each other. The funny part is that with the growing of number of recording sounds, the output sound is dynamic changing and form some new sound.

2. Take some more actual image and sound to test the effects of whole process. Aiming to a specific type of sound may be a good choice, such as city noise.

Conclusion/Acknowledge:

Although this project is far from fully completion, I learned a lot in this process, not only the technologies such as RPI, openFrameworks and Linux; more importantly, I learned a lot about input/output design, mapping, and telling story (a point I did not do well). It teaches me to think why should we design this device and inspired me to think whom and where does a device will be used in my future projects. Thanks Ali Momeni very much for his suggestions and all the conversations during this whole process of project, and all the reviewers and classmates who help me to improve my ideas and project.

 

Audible Color by Momo Miyazaki, CIID

Audio,OpenCV,Reference — Ding Xu @ 9:06 pm

audible color from Momo Miyazaki on Vimeo.

Final Project: Drawable Stompbox – Haochuan Liu

Assignment,Audio,Final Project — haochuan @ 12:32 pm

Drawable stompbox

Drawable stompbox offers a more interesting and interactive way for guitarist to explore the variety of the parameters of the guitar effect world. With this instrument, people can select the guitar effect they want, then use finger to draw the parameters of your effect. Just like the diagram of time-domain and frequency-domain, this instrument can map what you’ve drawn to specific a set of number representing the amplitude and frequency information which will change the pre-written guitar effect’s parameter. You will get a lot of fun when you are trying to figure out the relationship between your drawing and the sound you heard.

Screenshot and video demo

Here is the screenshot of the Drawable Stompbox running in my iPad:

ipad

When you are drawing on iPad, you can not see the lines or patterns. The reason I made the canvas always blank is letting people hear what they have drawn instead of seeing what they have drawn.

Here is a video demo:

drawable stompbox final video from Haochuan Liu on Vimeo.

Previous version

There had been a big change of my project. At the beginning, drawable stompbox was just like a selector for guitar effects: After people wrote down the effects on a piece of paper, the webcam which was above the paper would capture what you had written into a software written in openframeworks. The software would analyze the words and do the recognition using optical character recognition (OCR). When you wrote the right words, the software will tell puredata to turn on the specific effect through OSC, you would finally hear what you’ve written when you play your guitar.

Technical Details

Here is the diagram of Drawable Stompbox:

 Screenshot 2013-12-09 11.35.57

Buttons and coordinates

I use very simple functions in OpenFrameworks to draw the buttons and get the x/y coordinates when moving fingers on the screen of iPad.

Mapping

The blue coordinates which is invisible in the real software represents amplitude (x coordinate) and time (y coordinate) information.

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When you draw something on the canvas, the peak will determine the volume of the sound you will hear. The length of your drawing will determine the frequency parameter.

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Communication

The software in iPad uses OSC to communicate with PureData running on the laptop. Thus, PureData can always know which effect is selected and also the values of amplitude and frequency.

Future Work

Currently when you play the guitar with using the Drawable Stompbox you still need a partner to help you draw something on the canvas of iPad to get the parameter change of the effect. It is right now just a prototype or a toy for people to practice instead of performance. The improvement of this project can be changing using people’s finger to using people’s foot. Thus, you can play the guitar and use your foot to draw the effect parameter at the same time.

Final Project Presentation — Haochuan Liu

Assignment,Audio,Final Project,OpenCV — haochuan @ 10:09 pm

Drawable Stompbox

Write down your one of your favorite guitar effects on a piece of paper, then play your guitar, you will get the sound what you’ve written down.

Here is the final diagram of this drawable stompbox:

Screenshot 2013-11-27 22.11.45

 

After you write down the effects on a piece of paper, the webcam which is above the paper will capture what you’ve written into a software written in openframeworks. The software will analysis the words and do the recognition using optical character recognition (OCR). When your write the right words, the software will tell puredata to turn on the specific effect through OSC, you will finally hear what you’ve written when you play your guitar.

The source code of this software can be found here.

Here is a demo of how this drawable stompbox works.

Feedback from my final presentation:

I have got a lot of good idea and advice for my drawable stompbox as below:

1. Currently writing down a word to get the effects has no relationship with ‘drawing’. It is more like a effect selection using word recognition.

2. I was thinking of drawing simple face on the paper instead of just boring words. How about using a webcam directly to scan real people’s face, getting their emotion on their face and then find the relationship between different faces and different effects.

3. Words recognition is so hard, for there are a lot of factors to make it doesn’t work well, such as the hand-writing, the resolution of the webcam and the light of environment.

Following work:

For the following weeks, I decide to make my instrument a real drawable stompbox. I will begin with a very simple modulation:

People can simply draw the ‘wave’ like this:

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From this drawing, it is easy to define and map the amplitude and the frequency.

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Then I will use the ‘wave’ from the drawing to do a modulation with the original guitar signal. People can draw different type of waves to try how the sound changes.

 

Final Project Milestone 3 – Ding Xu

Audio,Final Project,Machine Vision,OpenCV — Ding Xu @ 10:24 pm

1. GPIO control board soldering

In order to use GPIO of RPI for digital signal control, I built a control protoboard  with two switches and two push buttons connecting a pull-up/pull-down registers respectively. A female header was used to connect the GPIO of RPI to get the digital signal.

In RPI, I used the library WiringPi for GPIO signal reading. After compiling this library and include the header files, three easy steps are used to read the data from digital pins: (1). wiringPiSetup() (2). set up pinmode: PinMode(GPIOX,INPUT) and (3). digitalRead(GPIOX) or digitalWrite(GPIOX)

photo_7(1)

 

2. software design

In openframeworks, I used  the library Sndfile for recording and ofSoundPlayer for sound output. There are two modes: capture and play. Users are expected to record as many as sounds in their lives and take an image each time recording a sound. Then in the play mode, the camera will capture a surrounding image and the sound tracks of similar images will be played.  The software workflow is as follows:

Capture:

Play:

code

3. system combination

Connecting the sound input/output device, RPI, singal control board and camera, the system is as follows:

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Final Project Documentation: The Wobble Box

Assignment,Audio,Final Project,Laser Cutter,Max,Sensors — Tags: , , , — Jake Berntsen @ 5:16 pm

After taking time to consider exactly what I hope to accomplish with my device, the aim of of my project has somewhat shifted. Rather than attempt to build a sound-controller of some kind that includes everything I like about current models while implementing a few improvements, I’ve decided to focus only on the improvements I’d like to see. Specifically, the improvements I’ve been striving for are simplicity and interesting sensors, so I’ve been spending all of my time trying to make small devices with very specific intentions. My first success has been the creation of what I’m calling the “Wobble Box.”

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Simply stated, the box contains two distance sensors which are each plugged into a Teensy 2.0.  I receive data from the sensors within Max, where I scale it and “normalize” it to remove peaks, making it more friendly to sound modulation.  While running Max, I can open Ableton Live and map certain audio effects to parameters in Max.  Using this technique I assigned the distance from the box to the cutoff of a low-pass filter, as well as a slight frequency modulation and resonance shift.  These are the core elements of the traditional Jamaican/Dubstep sound of a “wobble bass,” hence the name of the box.  While I chose this particular sound, the data from the sensors can be used to control any parameters within Ableton.

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Designing this box was a challenge for me because of my limited experience with hardware; soldering the distance sensors to the board was difficult to say the least, and operating a laser-cutter was a first for me.  However, it forced me to learn a lot about the basics of electronics and I now feel confident in my ability to design a better prototype that is smaller, sleeker, and more compatible with similar devices.  I’ve already begun working on a similar box with joysticks, and a third with light sensors.  I plan to make the boxes connectible with magnets.

IMG_1528For my presentation in class, I will be using my device as well as a standard Akai APC40.  The wobble box is not capable or meant to produce its own melodies, but rather change effects on existing melodies.  Because of this, I will be using a live-clip launching method to perform with it, making a secondary piece of hardware necessary.

 

Final Project Milestone 2 – Ding Xu

Audio,Final Project,Laser Cutter,OpenCV — Ding Xu @ 11:05 pm

In my second milestone. I finished the following stuff:

1. sound output amplification circuit. I first used a breadboard to test the audio output circuit using an amplifier connecting a speaker with a switch to augment the output sound and then  finished soldering a protoboard.

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2. Sound capture device: a mic with a pre-amp connecting an usb audio card was used for sound input. However, it spent me a lot of  time to configure the parameters in the Raspberrry Pi to make it work. I referred to several blog posts in the website to get asoundrc and asound.conf file well set for audio card select and alsa mixer for control. A arecord and aplay command were used to test the recording in linux. Then I revised an addon of OF ofxLibsndFileRecorder to achieve recording. However, from the testing result, the system is not very robust, sometimes the audio input will fail and sometimes the play speed will much faster than recording speed, accompanying much noise.

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alsamixer

3. GPIO test: in order to test control the audio input and output with  switch and button. I first used a breadboard connecting a switch with a pull-up or pull down resister as the recording/play control.

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4. Case building: a transparent case using laser cut was built.

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5. Simulink test: I searched that simulink recently supported the raspberry Pi with several well developed modules. So I tried to install an image of Simulink and run some simple demos with that platform. I also tested the GPIO control for triggering the switch between two sine wave generator in Simulink.

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Final Project Milestone 2 – Haochuan Liu

Assignment,Audio,Final Project — haochuan @ 7:37 pm

For my milestone 2, I have did a lot of experiments of audio effects in puredata. Besides very simple and common effects (gain, tremolo, distortion, delay, wah-wah) I made in milestone 1, here are the tests and demos I made for these new effects with my guitar.

Test 1: Jazz lead guitar

  • Original audio

 

  • Bass Synth

 

  • Falling Star

 

  • Phaser

 

  • Reverb

 

  • Ring Modulation

 

  • Slow Vibrato

 

  • Magic Delay

 

  • Violin

 

  • Vocoder

 

Test 2: Acoustic guitar

  • Original audio

 

  • Bass Synth

 

  • Falling Star

 

  • Phaser

 

  • Reverb

 

  • Ring Modulation

 

  • Slow Vibrato

 

  • Magic Delay

 

  • Violin

 

  • Vocoder

 

Test 3: Guitar single notes

  • Original audio

 

  • Bass Synth

 

  • Falling Star

 

  • Magic Delay

 

  • Vocoder

 

Final Project Milestone One: Jake Berntsen

My struggles thus far in this class have rested almost entirely on the physical side of things; I’m relatively keen with regards to using relevant software, but my ability to actually build devices is much less developed, to say the least.  With this in mind, I decided to make my early milestones for my final project focus entirely on the most technically challenging aspects in terms of electrical engineering; specific to my project, this meant getting all of the analog sensors running into my Teensy to obtain data I could manipulate in Max.  To do so meant a lot of prototyping on a breadboard.

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After exploring a wide variety of sensors, I found a few that seemed to give me a sharp control of the data received by Max.  One of my goals for this project is to create a controller that offers a more nuanced musical command than the current status quo, and I believe that the secret to this lies within more sensitive sensors.

 

The sensors I chose are picture below: Joysticks, Distance Sensors, Light Sensors, and a Trackpad.

Joystick

 

Light Sensor

 

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All of the shown sensors have proven to work dependably, with the exception of some confusion regarding the input sensors of the trackpad.  The trackpad I am using is from the Nintendo DS gaming device, and while it’s relatively simple to get data into Arduino, I’m having trouble getting data all the way into Max.

The other hardware challenge that I was facing this week was fixing the MPK Mini device that I planned to incorporate into my controller.  The problem with it was a completely detached mini USB port that is essential to the usage of the controller.  Connecting a new port to the board is a relatively simple soldering job, and I successfully completed this task despite my lack of experience with solder.  However, connecting the five pins that are essential for getting data from the USB is a much more complicated task, and after failing multiple times, I decided to train myself a bit in soldering before continuing.  I’ve not yet seen success, but I’ve improved greatly in the past few days alone and feel confident that I will have the device working within the week.

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If I continue working at this rate, I do believe that I will finish my project as scheduled.  While I was anticipating only being able to use the sensors that I could figure out how to use, I instead was able to make most of the ones I tried work with ease and truly choose the best one.

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