floor44.co.uk

I got (from what I can gather) a positive responce from the guys in the sound app ‘show and tell’ when I showcased my app for people who know nothing about music but still want to be able to perform really good tunes (AFPWKNAMBSWTBATPRGT…the name needs some refining) this afternoon.

As long as you don’t unlock the patch, the UI is hopefully quite simple. Since I coloured the sections to keep myself from going crazy looking at boxes and lines, I shall try to explain by colour.

• Orange – This is your main control panel. From the top down:
  • The volume dial controls the volume of the chords, preset to 127
  • The tempo of the song to be made, between 60 and 200bpm, preset to 90
  • The 4 LEDs flash in sequence, dentoning the beats of the bar (1 – red, 2, 3 and 4 – blue)
  • The length of a bar for the given tempo in milliseconds (non-editable)
  • The current position in the bar in milliseconds (non-editable)
  • Left In and Right In denote the volume of the input channel
  • Left Out and Right Out denote the volume of the live output channel (not the MIDI output)
  • The ‘Reset’ button will set all the options back to their initial settings and values
• Purple – This is so that you can choose the base note or ‘key’ of the song
• Blue – Both panels work in exactly the same way to play the various chords for the song
  • The top slider is the theoretical height of you hand above the chord sensor and moving it up cycles through the various chords with the ‘distance’ being shown below it
  • The ‘ceiling’ is the highest point of the top chord and until the hardware is implimented, this value should not need to be changed
  • The LEDs display the current chord
  • The checkbox is to activate the chord – clicking on will strike the chord and clicking it off will stop it
  • The patch below is for development purposes only
• Green – This is to active different variations of the chord in terms of tonality and dissonance
  • When checked the top checkbox ensures that a chord is output, but when unchecked, only a single note is output
  • The 4 buttons are to manually override the chord variations, however, changing the value on the sensor of the blue panel resets the variation to its intended form
• Yellow – This overrides the inversion of the chord, from root (1st note on bottom) to 1st inversion (3rd on bottom) and 2nd inversion (5th on bottom)
• Brown – This is the live recording panel, for which there are 3 channels each with a button which when clicked will record a sound
  N.B. Although a sound of up to 16 seconds can be recorded, the patch only supports the playback of a sound equal in length to a bar (orange panel)
• Turquoise – This is the playback panel of the patch
  • The checkbox should enable and disable the playback of the patch, but due to the complexity of the patch this can sometimes malfunction
  • The slider to the right of the checkbox adjusts the volume of the playback (use this if clicking and un-clicking the checkbox fails)
  • Below are 2 level indicators for the output sound – left on top and right on the bottom
  • The bottom slider (non-moveable) displays the current position of the sampled audio playback
• Grey – This panel is only used for creating the chords and provides no user-centric functionality

The patch was created on a Mac running GarageBand. My usual proceedure is to output the MIDI control from Max and use GarageBand to play a more realistic-sounding instrument, such as a grand piano or more usefully, some orchestral strings as these can be held for as long as needed.

I hope the patch is easier to use and understand than it was to make!

Download the patch (MaxMSP Patch – 262kb)

O…M…G! I have spent God-know-how-many hours on my sound app and I’ve only just discovered some functions that would have cut my development time in half!

I am currently working on the recording and looping part of the app. The test patch looks as follows:

The patch is only for 1 (YES – ONE!) channel and it has a few bugs still. so I have to make it suitable for 3 channels and tidy up the routing.

The main interface is looking quite nice and tidy:

…assuming you don’t unlock it!

…and the subpatches are all good and working:

…if not slightly overcrowded.

All in all, it’s going quite well(ish) and if I don’t encounter any major problems, then all will be good for the deadline on Tuesday!