For the animated abstraction, I took the color concept of my geometric abstraction and got rid of all the extra fluff. I used the cassette 808 samples to make a beat which activated animations based on the sound that was triggered. For example, a snare triggers a green ball while the cymbal triggers a yellow ball. Since I no longer was focusing on a radially symmetrical structure, I got rid of the variations; since I was focusing on color, all of the monochrome stuff was discarded. I used the primary and secondary colors to sync with the sounds, with the primary colors of light lining up with the main beat and the secondary colors of light lining up with the second layer of sounds. I tried to keep a semblance of structure (the balls are supposed to move towards their corresponding branch from the geometric abstraction), but my use of randomness made that difficult to work with. I decided not to work with layers as I liked the look of the spheres overlapping each other on occasion.

The patch is organized into three loose sections of varying size and complexity. The top left section holds the initial objects for start up, with a button to both start up the Jitter window, create the first white sphere, which changes to black and shrinks over a duration of 2 seconds, and play a sound outside the loop. This first sound triggers a delayed bang that starts the main loop after 2 seconds. Once the main loop starts, it triggers a 4 second delayed bang that starts the second loop which adds a second layer to the audio. The rightmost section holds the audio works, including two metros and counters, connected to their own select, which is connected to the playlists. The playlists are identical and could have probably been merged, but I was uncertain that it would play two overlapping sounds if it were just one audio control. There are two metros since I wanted to start the second ‘layer’ of audio after a full loop of the initial layer of audio. The counters have different max points, though they line up naturally due to being scaled by a factor of two. The first layer has 16 quarter-second beats in its loop, while the second layer has 32 quarter-second beats in its loop. The bottom left section holds the six sphere objects – one for each color used. They are activated by the messages that select triggers. On activation, it sets the color, scale, and position, which change over time. The color fades to black and the sphere shrinks over the course of a quarter second (the same time frame as the metros). As this is happening, the spheres move in a given direction with a level of randomness determined by drunk. In order to test the patch and turn off both metronomes at the same time, I created a button that bypasses delays specifically to toggle both metronomes so that their counters stay synced.