Wendy came to ITP today to try out the rope&pulley system. We also shot some videos which better explain the interaction between the user and the system.
Introduction
Here, the rope&pulley is controlling the playback speed, direction, and volume of a sample from Jimi Hendrix's "Red House."
Explanation
Vertical
Today I made some revisions to the Max/MSP patches that interface the rope&pulley to the computer. In preparation for the videotaping session I'm doing with Wendy tomorrow, I wanted to make sure that it was easy to switch back and forth between the different patches. When I've done that in the past, I've always run into trouble -- I invariably forget to configure some part of the patch. While cleaning up the patches I found that I could structure things in a way that may make it easier to combine them should the need arise.
I have three different versions of the patch now:
Audio
- rope&pulley controls playback direction (and optionally speed) of user-selectable .wav audio samples.
MIDI
- rope&pulley plays notes on a MIDI synthesizer and can adjust two user-configurable MIDI realtime controller values.
Movie
- rope&pulley scrubs a looped QuickTime movieplays. Scrubbing rate is mapped to the pulley's rotation speed and the scaling of this value can be adjusted from the patch.