Ticha-Do you hear the birdie sing

My creature ended up not being an abstract or fantastical mystical one, but a relatively normal-looking robin that responds to the user’s voice. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of work with the AudioInput library in processing because of the level of interactivity it offers between the user and the program. As someone who grew up in a musically oriented environment, I strongly believe that music is one of the best methods of bonding individuals. Thus, I created a robin that responds to singing but runs away when the input audio level exceeds a certain threshold. At the certain point, the robin will start to dance and even sing along once it has gained enough of the user’s trust.

I admit that I am still not completely satisfied with this project – I had spent so much time on trying to make the audio work and handling awkward boolean logic that I was not able to make the simulation as sophisticated as I wanted it to be. Nevertheless, this was a very valuable learning experience for me as it forced me to reason about my code more carefully and reacquainted me with good ol’ null pointer exceptions.

Dropbox link for the code because OpenProcessing hates me: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m1pbwk68zsvgkzz/singing_bird.zip