Mesh Thinger Prototype

Mesh Thinger is a 3D sonogram, with the addition of webcam input, and a wave generator. These three components can be mixed together to generate the mesh.

 

Webcam Input

Luminance of the webcam input is directly bound with the mesh. Brighter pixels will create higher points in the mesh. A really simple, but effective 3D effect from a 2D camera. I might swap this out for a Kinect or Leap Motion for proper 3D input.

Sonogram

I built an FFT module a few months back and tried adding it. The red line running across is the point that the FFT display writes to the mesh. X is time, Y is frequency (128 linearly spread bins from a 2048 sample FFT), and Z is the amplitudes of each frequency bin. By putting the webcam and sonogram together, I get a visually interactive 3D sound object. There is no audio in the above video, however my computer mic was feeding the FFT.

Wave Generator

The wave generator has two [cycle~] objects that are pushed into two [buffer~]. One buffer that have 128 samples. Each sample is mapped to the height of the mesh along the X axis. Along the Y axis is a gradient mix of the two, fading from A through B.
When playing with the frequencies of the two [cycle~]s, it’s possible to create some really interesting patterns in the mesh. It’s to do with the number of samples that are written over length of the plane, vs the frequency of the sine wave oscillation. There are still some bugs with artefacts that disturb the mesh, but they shouldn’t be a huge deal to iron out quickly.

1 Comment

  • Hey Chris!

    Great patch and nice work. I’m currently interested in different creations of sonograms in Max. I would love to take a peek at this. Would that be possible? alternatively a screenshot of the patcher window?

    All the best!
    thm

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