{"id":1149,"date":"2019-09-15T17:37:50","date_gmt":"2019-09-15T21:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joshuarosenstock.com\/teaching\/imgd3200-a19\/?p=1149"},"modified":"2019-09-15T17:37:50","modified_gmt":"2019-09-15T21:37:50","slug":"paper-nature-cem-alemdar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joshuarosenstock.com\/teaching\/imgd3200-a19\/paper-nature\/calemdar\/paper-nature-cem-alemdar\/","title":{"rendered":"Paper Nature – Cem Alemdar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For this project I created a simple drum pad with three ambient sounds caused by the sun, the rain cloud, and the rainbow. Hitting these trigger the sound on and off. I wanted the ambient sounds to be a continuous loop that you could toggle instead of it starting from the beginning each time you hit it. So I used a live.gain object to adjust the volume up and down instead of sending a bang to the playlist object. I tried muting the ezdac object but that stopped all playing audio for some reason. The audio for the ambient sounds can’t be heard that well in the video, so I will explain how I came up with the sounds. I came up with some radiant, soothing sound for the sun, using moderate reverb, and a lot of gain. I used a rain sound that I had previously recorded, with some thunder in the background that I added. I used an audio illusion that always seems to get higher for the rainbow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also had a frog and a bird that makes random frog or bird sounds from a playlist of five different sounds I edited. I was not able to find good frog sounds, so I ended up editing one recording of the same frog croaking multiple times, but realized that they were still sounding very similar even after a lot of editing. But I managed to get some cool bird sounds. The sounds the animals made were single samples that played until you hit it again, which triggers another random sound from the playlist object. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For the animations, I didn’t want to use Adobe Animate because of how time consuming it is, also because of my lack of drawing skills. So I decided on doing all the animation in MAX. I mapped different counters with different speeds to change the color of the background. The sun to the red channel, the rain to the blue channel, and the rainbow to the green channel. The animals change positions every time they get triggered. Their position is normalized to the size of the window, and I used the drunk object to make them move relative to where they were previously. So they don’t jump around too much. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While making the physical aspect of this project, I was not sure on how to create a surface that was satisfying to hit, while having a visually pleasing surface. I thought of drawing everything, which would somewhat allow me to use a create the circuits using a graphite pencil. However, I realized that I would have to fill the inside of the drawings with graphite as well, so I got the idea of creating the overall image in photoshop, and attach aluminium foil on top of the images. This seemed like a good idea in theory, but ended up being fairly obstructive of the image, and hard to be precise. At least they were reliable in terms of conductivity, where graphite was not. I also wrapped the tips of a pair of drumsticks with aluminium foil so people could play it like a drum pad. However I realized that the circuit would not be completed when the tip of the drumstick touched the aluminium on the paper. I coincidentally discovered that hitting the paper while touching the aluminium at the tip of the drumstick would complete the circuit. So I wrapped some conductive thread around the drumstick creating a connection between the holding end of the drumstick and the aluminium tip. This worked flawlessly. I also didn’t want people to just hit a piece of paper on a table, because it is not a very satisfying feeling. So I taped the paper on a drum practice pad so there was some cushioning under it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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