Exercise: Arduino Sensor to Synthesized Sound via Pure Data

Objective

Map a physical measurement to a synthesized sound using Arduino input into Pd.

Please review the notes for 1.c.ii.1 as all of them apply to this exercise as well. This exercise assumes you have an Arduino programmed with the OneInOneOutASCII sketch to communicate physical data to and from an Arduino. The Pd patches are available in the same materials folder as this file.

This exercise is almost identical to the previous 1.c.ii.32 Sensor to GUI exercise, only the mapping is from a sensor to a synthesized sound. This is a transition into more advanced audio processing in Pd.

Steps and observations

1. Open the sensor-to-sound.pd patch in Pd-extended.
2. Open the connection to the Arduino using one of the serial port name message objects.
3. Enable audio processing by clicking the green Enable_Audio button.
4. Touch the A0 pin with your finger; just the electrical noise from your finger should be enough signal to trigger the synthesizer.
5. Attach an analog sensor to A0 and see if it makes a playable instrument.
6. Try varying the sliders in the Oscillator Bank section of the patch to change the sound properties.

Comments

There is a lot going on in the synthesizer; in the following exercises we will isolate more components of Pd signal processing and work back towads this kind of complexity.

Other Files

1. sensor-to-sound.fzz
2. sensor-to-sound.pd
3. Arduino-server.pd