7.0 Pcomp MID.

Wheesh. I thought I had a lot of time but I always run out of time. And tick tock, now it's presentation day.

I also have a hard time recording all of this so please bare with me on this blog :D

So, from where I left off last time, I wanted to connect my Touch Designer visual to a heartbeat sensor, and I wanted my heart to drive a visual. That circle that I manipulated with the Potentiometer kept reminding me of a heartbeat, so while I was looking for a heart beat sensor on Amazon, a friend told me that the shop had these heartbeat sensors equipped.

Super happy, I ran to the shop and checked out the sensor. Then immediately, I wired the sensor into my breadboard, right in the place where my potentiometer lived. And magically it worked! The value range was ofcourse was different, but it was functional. I felt very lucky, and I started playing with what I can do in Touch Designer.

Rather than having just a plane sphere scale up and down, my initial goal was to deform the sphere with the data that I was receiving from the sensor. In the process (since this was my first time in Touch Designer) I went into Touch Designer tutorials and was able to deform the sphere with the given data.

My initial project was over for the midterm. My goal was to create a project that connects the real world and the digital, and having the physical generate the digital. Although at a primal state, I achieved my goal.

So then, the fun began.

With the pulse, so that I can have a signal when there's a clear reading, I plugged in a red LED light to inspect my heartbeat signal. I also attached the speaker so that I can inspect it audio-wise too. (tbh I tried to play audio through this but it was way too small, and there was no way I would know how to make the volume bigger. I assumed it was a power issue.)

Then, I realized that having audio would be an amazing approach, not just for the creativity sakes, but even for the presentation as well. I did hear that this was going to be a public presentation, so I wanted to be prepared for it.

So I added audio.

I ended up changing the color of the background too, after realizing that the bass would add a very dark theme to this project. XD Had to see it coming, but Hehe heh doesn't matter.

So using the same heartbeat signal that was being channeled into TouchDesigner, I grabbed the stream of data and fed it to an audio player node(operator, in TD terms). and made the heartbeat trigger the bass to play. So technically with every heartbeat, the bass would go off, and the whole song wouldn't be played, as long as my heart was beating.

I thought this was kind of a cool heart signal-thing that would not be welcomed in a hospital.

After adding bass triggers, I realized that this could be more dramatic, so I ended up adding more sound elements into this project, and kind of landed on what I have right above there.

Not really halloween theme, but I guess Christmas theme, heh?

Had fun with this, and I hope to find more ways to implement this and take steps further into diving deeper.

But for now, Ciao Mid terms. :D