Software
When I started the product phase, I originally expected to spend quite little time in Pure Data and rather a lot in Ableton creating the composition. But I decided to rebuild a lot of the patch for workflow reasons, which I consider an extremely crucial decision now.
I gained a lot of space in the patch, because I could delete all the data cleaning and pre-processing functionality, since I was getting very clean MIDI data with the SOMI-1. There were seven MIDI parameters per sensor directly coming from the receiver now – six of them were the same as in the 2.4SINK systemand the seventh was the Pythagorean triple of the acceleration, giving me the total acceleration that I calculated myself previously (called ‘activity’). It was cleaned of gravity force, making it more accurate.
The approach to creating the new Pure Data patch for an improved workflow was mainly focused on dynamics and abstracting. The features that became very useful in the later process will be described in detail below.
Input Abstraction with Monitor/Solo Function
I created an abstraction that provides some extended functionality while scaling input values to the range 0-1 and renames them. Besides the convenience and cleanliness, it comes with individual ‘monitor’ and ‘solo’ buttons, which turn on the number field inside the graph-on-parent (that is by default turned off to save computing power) and turn off all processed input but the ones soloed, respectively. Additionally, all instances of the abstraction react to one global ‘off’ button, as well as a global ‘monitor all’ button. The three input parameters are the MIDI controller number, the channel number, and the name of the new variable.
