Music Timebender (Week 8 Theme: Time as Material)

Theme: Time as Material

Context:

I was really interested in how to manipulate time (make it faster and slower), and I've always wanted to play around with the Leap Motion. That led me down the path of using the Leap Motion to manipulate music, where the position of my hand can speed up or slow down the piece of music. This type of physical interaction reminded me of the THEREMIN, an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the thereminist (performer). 

Method:

I've always wanted to use CPS to learn TouchDesigner and Leap Motion, and thought this week's theme would allow me to do this. So I found a tutorial on how to generate a simple audio reactive visualisation in TouchDesigner, and a simple tutorial on how to select specific properties of my hand via the Leap Motion in order to use the values to manipulate properties of the audio. I also used the Derivative docs to learn more about the operator parameters, like Creating Audio with CHOPs and the Stretch CHOP.

Response:

Most TouchDesigner tutorials online are so long, I was lucky to find this short tutorial about how to generate visualisations based on sound so I could have something visual on the screen. After selecting the property that detects the height of my hand, I linked that with the Length Scale parameter in the Stretch CHOP (see screenshot), so when I move my hand up and down, it condenses/stretches the time of the music, but when the parameter hits the value of 1, it returns to normal speed. I'm still not 100% sure if it's working as both the condensed and stretched music sounded quite similar to me - I think I'll need to spend more time delving into TouchDesigner and Leap Motion in order to fully understand how they work. But for my first time trying these new software/hardware, I was happy that I was able to get something working, i.e. to convey the concept of "varying time" by letting the user manipulate time.

Music Credits:

• Sky Skating by Geographer in the YouTube Audio Library