In my first study, I have tried to develop the idea of multiple tactile pieces working together to create a whole or achieve a goal. Three buttons need to be pressed to allow the audience to hear the music fully, ideally, these would be at a distance from each other, meaning each one would have to be pressed by a different person. If no buttons are pressed, the music is not heard, and as each button is pressed the music becomes more clear. This was inspired by the theme of collaboration found in the narratives of the 7bit Hero live shows.

In this study, without an engaged audience, the music literally does not exist, I’m aiming to portray listening as something that is very intentional, as well as something that improves when shared.

Technically, the biggest challenge in this study was successfully registering if all 3 buttons (keys) were pressed, I ran into some issues with the way that Max calculates inputs based on the order of the inlets, which I managed to fix after trying a few different methods.

The only other minor issue I faced was getting the sfplay~ object to work properly. I chose to use that instead of playlist~ to save resources, however, it was a little bit harder to get working. An example of this was the fact that it doesn’t play some formats and was only outputting noise when given a .mp3, to fix the problem I had to convert the file to a .aiff. After some problem solving I now understand that object a lot better.

Download the Max Patch here.