Motivation

Learning an instrument can be very hard. So why not making music as easy as looking around.
Imagine yourself standing in front of a "wall", which has different squares of different colours. By watching at one
square, a tone appears and if you look at another square, another tone appears. Change your view to a higher or
lower position and the pitch will change.

How should this work?

A camera attached on the head of the user detects the square-colour on the wall and matches them to the tone.
If the colour caught from the camera changes the tone changes. To make the program intuitve to work with,
the pitch gets higher if you look up and gets lower if you look down. For the capturing the users view we will
use Max/MSP.

Production Report

It really turns out, that Max/MSP is a great program to realize our project. It has an easy learning curve and
everything is quit intuitive to work with. So most of the work was done in our heads first, to get the idea. The
implementation was just a question of how fast we could get familiar with Max/MSP – and this does not take
long, as mentioned.

Things to improve eyeTunes

There are two major problems, we have to deal with all the time. The first one ist the colour detection.
Depending on the light, it’s difficult for the iSight to capture the right colour, because the square-color changes,
if somebody in the room turn the light on or off or even opens the door!A solution would be a big spot, which
lights the area up that much, that other sources cannot disturbed anymore.
The other problem is the feedback for the user. The onliest feedback, the user gets is, if a tone appears. Because
of the camera situated on the head, the user doesn’t really know, where the camera views exactly. That’s why
another kind of feedback would be great. Just like a little monitor, which shows where the camera is pointing.
Another suggestions from our overwhelming Professor ;) is a laserpointer situated next to the camera, so
that the user is able to recognize, where the camera is pointing.

 

Download our MaxMSP file here.