Sound Drawing V1
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Sound Drawing is an interactive study meant to explore what sound might look like were it to be visually represented as it comes out of your mouth. It is a miniature offshoot of a larger project that I’ve been working on which utilizes both face-tracking and sound visualization. Though unrelated, it coincidentally came about during Zach Lieberman’s short residency at UGA. Along with Golan Levin he created a similar project with the Hidden Worlds of Noise and Voice. With Sound Drawing, though, I wanted to make the study accessible to a larger audience and to give the user more control so it can be used more as a drawing tool than a self contained work of art.
With Sound Drawing V1 the sound that you make controls aspects of the drawing tool. The loudness determines the height, the brightness determines the width, and the pitch determines the color. Its fun to do it with multiple people because it draws in front of the mouth of all of the faces in the frame. Be careful about how close you get to the camera though because if part of the face is chopped off the software doesn’t recognize it and won’t draw. So if you want to draw real close to the edge of the frame you’ll have to move back.
I’m hoping to push the project onto the web before the end of the summer, but for now, if you have a web-cam and a microphone, you can download the apps and play around with it. Be sure to leave comments if its not working.
Download Sound Drawing Version 1.0 For Mac
Directions:
1) Click the download link above.
2) Unzip the folder containing the applications. Double Click OpenCV.dmg and install.
3) Open the sound_analysis application. Select “Audio” in the menu on the top left to start reading the audio. You can control the volume with the fader on the right if you need to.
4) Open the facetracking1.app.
5) Make noise and draw pictures!
Controls:
O – Outline
S – Save A Picture
F – Toggles Fullscreen Mode
R – Switch between an elliptical versus a rectangular drawing tip
C – Clear
Esc – Closes Program
Technical Jargon:
The facial tracking and drawing parts to the program were written in Processing. Thanks to Stephane Cousot for helping make it possible with his newest java port of opencv. The sound analysis is driven in Max/Msp by Tristen Jehan’s analyzer~ and Miller Pucket’s fiddle~. The two communicate with osc.