Jan 9, 2012

BOXOUND


This is the application I did for the high school research project (Design and implementation of an interactive sonic system) in 2009-2010. The application is a visual and sonic simulation of the collisions between metal and/or wood objects and the movement of the objects is controlled by the mouse or the keyboard:


In Catalonia it is boundary to make a research project the year before going to college, and this is what I did. We are free to choose a topic and I decided to explain all the design and implementation needed for creating a simulation of a real sound interaction. I tried hard to simulate a natural movement of the objects and to explain in detail all the work I had to do while programming and designing all the fields of the application. I developed this using the open source language Processing (http://processing.org/). 

This was done mostly during the summer of 2009 in an internship I did in the Music Technology Group (http://mtg.upf.edu). There I learned all I needed to start the project and I was able to get all the help I required from some of the researchers within the group.

Also, thanks to that I was able to record all the sounds I use for the application in a recording studio of Pompeu Fabra University. All the sounds I recorded are available in my freesound channel (http://www.freesound.org/people/SuGu14/). 

Just mention that all the sounds are different (not the same sound played with different intensities) and there is a difference in sound when the boxes hit the surface with the corner or completely flat. The way I programmed this distinction is illustrated in the image below, where you can see how the center of the box is higher when it hits the corner:

When I finished the project and presented it in my school I sent the project to two different contests of Research Projects organized by two well-known universities from Catalonia (UAB and UPF) and I am so glad I won an honorific mention in both of them:
  • VII Premi Argó a Treballs de Recerca de Batxillerat UAB 2009 - 2010
  • IV Premi UPF de Treball de Recerca en Enginyeria i Matemàtica Aplicada 2009 - 2010
Here you can find the source code of the app:
http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/6761

And this is the full report of the project written in catalan:
Disseny i implementació d'un sistema interactiu sonor
I also developed a version where the objects are controlled using the 'Wii Remote' controller using the Processing library 'wrj4p5' and a stereo version that depending where the box hits the surface you can hear the sound more in the right or left speaker (contact me if you want the source code of any of these).

Instructions for the app:

The "drop cube button" in the upper-left menu releases the cube while maintaining the button pressed. 

The arrows in the lower menu select which material you want to interact with and you can choose the number of cubes existing at once (maximum of two).

You can select the way you want to control the objects, either by mouse or keyboard, clicking on the corresponding buttons.


When using keyboard: [1] [2] selects which cube to control and [a] [d] rotates the cube. 

The following images summarize the controls using the keyboard and also the version for the Wii Remote.