Kyria Nelson – Sound Controlled Animation Example (kind of.)

Boy, this one aged like milk!

First of all, this project was controlled by visuals for my class, not audio – so think of innovative ways to control your Max patches in other ways (using your voice, etc)!

Secondly, I made this patch before the Netflix documentary “Leaving Neverland”, and had pretty much no knowledge of Michael Jackson’s personal life. If you don’t know what I’m going on about, you can look it up if you’d like, (or don’t, I guess), but know that I would have chosen another subject for this patch had I known about it.

Anddd, that’s really all I have to explain. Without further ado, here’s the original post:

So I’m kind of bad at technology?

After several attempts to make this project using Colorpicker, I realized that it would be much easier with point-tracker.

In class when we first went over computer vision, I had a dream that I could make a program where you could put on Michael Jackson’s single white glove and dance with it to have some music play, or something to that effect. However Colorpicker did not like the white glove, and preferred reflections from the window on literally anything else instead. So I made a tiny white hand out of paper. This worked better but still the program would get stuck on the wall.

Then I came to realize that it was very difficult to get the program to recognize how one was moving. How was I going to program it to look for dance moves? So instead I made a grid on top of the videoplane and decided to play noises based on which element of the grid the hand was in.  I had an embarrassing amount of trouble getting that to work.

I decided instead of music I would use some audio from this wonderful video: (DO NOT listen to this in public, without context it sounds VERY WEIRD.)

Now moving the glove around the screen made weird Michael Jackson grunts. I decided the only logical thing to do with this would be to make a little Michael Jackson to tap with the glove in order to get him to make these noises. During this time, Colorpicker annoyed me greatly and remained incredibly temperamental. I remembered cv_tracker from class and how it actually felt like it worked. So I switched from a white glove to just tracking whatever I felt like. Here’s a demonstration of the final product!:

In this video I thought that Screen Capture was recording my whole screen but it was only actually recording myWindow. It doesn’t affect much besides at the end when I try to show the viewer my patch. You can see it below instead:

I hope you enjoyed! Once I got this working I sure did 🙂

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