The final study! For this one I wanted to take my interactive content full circle, reimagining my very first creation in Max, which was a system where the user had to press a series of keys to hear a song. This was done to portray listening as an intentional experience, however I always had hoped of setting this up so that interaction with a particular object would trigger a prerecorded audio track of that object, and that when several objects where interacted with (i.e: a guitar, drums, keyboard, microphone) all their audio tracks would sync up to create a song. Basically, I thought it might be fun to recreate rock band with less difficulty and real instruments.

Because planning to use real instruments was probably overscoping a little bit, I decided to take things digital, and use some loops in Ableton Live, all created to be in the same key. I’m by no means a master of music or Ableton, so they don’t sound awesome but they more act as placeholders to show the potential of the work.

I updated the system so that each audio track would be triggered by a different key on the keyboard, in this case: A, F, J and ; . In an attempt to add some longevity to the interaction I prevented all audio tracks from being played at the same time, meaning the user will spend a bit more time experimenting with different combinations and in some sense, building a song. In addition to this I also updated the little colour visualiser I created in the original one to work with the user’s webcam feed. This time adding some cool glitch effects and colour effects which work in time with the beat of the audio.

Download the Max Patch here.