Sight Drawing Sound was a program developed in collaboration with Lesley Flanigan in hopes of letting us “draw” music. The initial idea had been to use a camera to scan a hand-drawn image on paper and have it output in music, but we ended up heading towards a more real-time approach, outputting tones in real-time based on incoming data.
Users waved a small baton with an LED at the tip to in effect conduct the music they wanted to play, a video camera tracked the light’s movement, and the resulting positions would trigger changes in the tone and texture of the audio being played.
The final presentation involved a Processing applet reading values from an iSight camera, outputting MIDI values into Absynth.
