[ITP: Designing Your Voice] Inter-FACE?!

Idea

For my synth final I wanted to make something that could be a part of my thesis, my Body of Work. My thesis is a series of sculptures that depict my body parts. I developed this idea of creating an “interFACE” synth. I wanted to create a sequencer that would play back body sounds and kind of looked like my face.

Sketch

Here are some crazy sketches I did over the course of the last couple of weeks:

Samples

The first step was recording samples. My buddy Josh lent me his lil mic set up and I recorded some weird “body sounds” on my phone.

I then trimmed them up and converted the .mp4 files to .wav on my computer. I think I did this in the Music app (FKA iTunes) but I don’t quite remember how.

open file in music, import settings —> WAV encoder, File -> conver —> create wav version

Then I used the wav2sketch package to convert all my .wav samples into C++ files which can be stored directly on the Teensy’s memory! Playing samples back from the Teensy’s on-board memory has a lower latency than playing back from the SD card reader. It is really crucial that the .wav files are at 44100 Hz and 16 or 8-bits for conversion. More instructions can be found in Jesse’s slides.

Later on I realized that I needed the samples to be at the same volume for a better sound experience. I tried messing around with gain values in my code to amplify selected samples but I didn’t get the effect I was looking for. I downloaded Audacity which is a free and open-source audio tool and used the “loudness normalization” effect to get the samples all the same volume.

do not use a4