Sound Control

The aim of this project is to create musical compositions, process them and simultaneously generate visual representations of its sounds.

Using Arduino board for the Inputs and Processing for the Outputs, we developed an interface to play and record self-created tracks.

Diverse components of sound were added to make it interesting and fun, allowing compositions of infinite results.

These results are defined through two different outputs: sound and visual graphics. The two run simultaneously and give a immediate stimulation to both sight and hearing senses.

The sound is generated by the use of 3 different potentiometers, and 2 buttons. The potentiometers control the Beat, the Notes full scale, and the Length of the chord respectively. The buttons control the general Tempo of the composition: Up to make it faster and Down to make it slower.

To elaborate the sound in Processing we used the Minim library by Damien Di Fede and Anderson Mills. The audio library uses the JavaSound API, a bit of Tritonus, and Javazoom’s MP3SPI to provide an easy to use audio library to develop audio interactions in Process’s environment. Specifically the code uses the CreateInstrument and the Recording function to reproduce notes out of binary signals.

A fourth potentiometer gives the possibility to control the graphic output directly from the Arduino board.
The lines represent the sine of the sound frequency, and the dots are a representation of the eight notes of the octave scale.
The potentiometer enables to modify of the line stroke and the dot’s size.

We look forward to experiment more with this project and improve the results by managing random sequences. The code is open source so we hope you enjoy it.

Arduino Board