Week 8

This week, in our group we continued the experimentation of different sensors to see which would be best suited to be used in the group project. For this session we focused more on manipulating the values read by the sensor and giving a desired output.

We tested what we thought was an Infra-Red sensor, to give a value that Max/MSP would use to parse to a sound output. First we tried the square-wave generator to produce a sound, that would only sound if the value read by the if statement was true, else it would not play anything. We then swapped the square wave generator for Max/MSP's MIDI synthesizer and produced a MIDI sound using the same conditions.

Here is a screenshot of the Max/MSP setup...


We discovered that using analogue sensors will make the code in Max/MSP hard to set up to give a 'sensible' sound as we found the sensor kept sensing and not sensing different values so much the system would be unreliable to use. However, it could be considered that the 'unreliability' or more 'unpredictability' offered by the sensor's readings could enhance the user experience. The group has yet to decide on this.