Robert Keller Project 2 – Project sPIral

Hello! For our final project, we created an installation using the Media Lab’s 8 speakers, a raspberry Pi, an accelerometer, DMX floorlights, and a ROLI Seaboard. The idea of our project was to play audio around the room on the speakers, and use lights to cue the listener on where the audio is actually coming from. We used 3 distinct “voices” which could be any audio file. These voices rotate around the room in a lissajous pattern. The position of the voices and additional audio-synthesis can be controlled with the ROLI seaboard and an accelerometer that’s been hooked up to a raspberry pi. As a group member, I assisted with lighting, and helped to get the raspberry pi operational. My main role was creating a max patch that incoorporated the accelerometer data into our project’s audio synthesis and provided control signals to the lights and the speakers. The patch implements granular synthesis, altered playback speed, downsampling, spectral delay, and band filtering to create a unique slew of sounds that will ultimately be played on our 8 speakers. This project was an excellent exercise in debugging, control flow, and sound synthesis.  Below is a demonstration of our system in action. You should be able to hear 3 unique “voices”, one of which is controlled by the raspberry PI:

Below is a video of me detailing my max patch extensively, and showing how to use it (save for the subpatches which can be viewed in the attached zip file at the bottom, also, audio is included in the video):

Below is a gist of the main patch:

Finally, I’ve attached a zip file with all the files you’ll need to use the patch:

seaboardfinal