My original goal is to create a visual generator that uses a keyboard interface as the only input and uses the advantage of MIDI sequencer to sequence visuals. I started by exploring Jitter in Max/MSP, and ended up creating 2 projects that are not quite close to my goal.
The first project “keyboard oscilloscope” captures my effort to associate MIDI input with simple geometric shapes. Each additional note input increases the number of cubes that form the shape of a ring, whose overall x position is associated with a low-frequency-oscillator on an oscillator and y position with another low-frequency-oscillator on a low-pass filter. What I found interesting about this oscilloscope is, as we can see and hear in the video, as the modulation rate increases, we start to hear the beating effect and the changing visuals align with the frame rate and become “static”. Since I started this project by algorithmically generate everything, the color, positions of cubes, number of cubes, it became challenging to proceed to implement the sequencer functionality.
However, I really wanted to build a visual machine that can potentially become a visual sequencer. So I created “weird reality”, which is a virtual space that contains 64 spheres floating around, each corresponds to a different sin wave. “weird reality” has 3 modes:
1. Manual: manually dragging the spheres around and hear the raising and falling of sin waves; 2. turning on the demon mode and the spheres will automatically go up and down; 3. turning on the
2. Demon mode: the spheres automatically go up and down; 3. turning on the
3. Weird mode: the world has an invisible force field that can only be traced by spheres that move around it. The world sometimes changes its perspective and rotates around, and that’s when the force field is traced by all spheres.