Ever Wonder What it Would be Like to Draw Sound?

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I’m working on a MaxMSP performance patch that uses a Wacom tablet to draw light onto dancers holding light sensitive instruments. Last night we decided to apply sound to the strokes to give the illustrator another way to interact in the piece. Currently the pressure from the pen is translated into the volume and the velocity is translated into pitch. It will need some fine tuning, but I think you can get the idea from the video.

10 thoughts on “Ever Wonder What it Would be Like to Draw Sound?”

  2. That’s pretty interesting. Can you simulate instruments on that? You should try changing the pitch to pressure and volume to velocity. Or maybe if you could have the Y axis change pitch, pressure for volume, and velocity could manipulate some effect like reverb or distortion. Of course that wouldn’t be as much like drawing, but it would make an interesting instrument. I have no idea if you have the capabilities to do such things, but you should if you can.

  3. I like this patch. It seems to be responding to the stylus faster than the LCD response in my patches. I have timed the average response time for output from the LCD at about 30 ms ( using Max and XP ) and have not been able to improve that. I think the response time to accurately record the actions of an artist drawing has to be less than 10 ms. I am wondering if it is worth trying to hack Max to mess with the polling speed for LCD.

  4. @David, Actually I’m not polling the LCD object, but grabbing the Wacom data directly from the Wacom external. Perhaps that polls faster than the LCD object, because I’m not sensing anywhere near 30 ms of latency. 10 at the most.

  5. Just when I was hittig a wall — another avenue to explore ! I love playing with all these Max widgets.

  9. hello, i have a suggestion. is it possible that you can replace the sound with pencil drawing sound? I think it would be really nice software and digital artist would love this software.

    it like something similar to Mechvibes , a software that have sound for the keyboard. And people now is asking for the mice sound as well, but no one had done it yet. (at now 2021)

  10. Hi Alexandra, that would be possible. I no longer have a Wacom tablet and this project is no longer active, but I think you’re right about it being an interesting approach!

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