Interactive Holiday Noise Machine

Doing some live processing of sleigh bells in Pure Data to create an “Interactive Holiday Noise Music System.”

Since it’s mid-December, let’s make some holiday music. If you’re sick of the standard cloying Muzak fare, though, you can make your own feedback delay sample-crushing interactive music system in Pure Data in an afternoon.

The main point here is getting a “trigger” from audio input crossing a loudness threshold. Once we have that trigger, we can use it to make changes in live-processing of a sound and trigger other sounds too. This is a simple idea, but its effectiveness is going to depend on what these changes are and how we play with the system.

0:00 Demo
0:26 Introduction / Goals
1:23 Input Monitoring
2:41 Direct (“Dry”) Output
4:08 Feature Extraction with [sigmund~]
6:55 Amplitude as Trigger
8:43 Triggering Changes in Delay
12:44 Sample-Crushing
17:03 Triggering an Oscillator
19:37 Oscillators into Harmony
23:35 Putting it all together
25:33 Closing Thoughts

More experimental Christmas music: