Assignment 2: “DialToneMadness” by Mauricio Contreras (2013)
DialToneMadness is an instrument that generates different audio tones, which frequency and period of repetition can be altered by proximity. It is based both in the Android and Arduino development platforms. It uses an ultrasonic based proximity sensor to measure distance to the “triggering” object, whatever that may be. The sensor is triggered and read from within Arduino and is then sent to the smartphone running Android. The latter reads this information and produces a tone based on it. Due to the aesthetic of the piece, with a high end smartphone, “retro” DTMF tones were used. This gives the audio output of the piece an interesting turn, since these sounds contain multiple tones and are not just sorted in a higher/lower pitch fashion. The smartphone responds with a single tone per message sent by the Arduino, hence the period of the repetitions is controlled by the latter, and is a linear function of the distance.
