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forastic · 2 years ago

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Pure Data sound puzzle prototyping

UCSC DANM grad school winter 2023 - week 4 (jan30 - feb5)

A class has a ‘skill share’ component, where we teach a skill to one or more students. I’m teaching Pure Data and Raspberry Pis. One student in my cohort is working on escape rooms, and I started thinking about what kind of sound puzzles an escape room could have. Pure Data can activate python scripts, which can then turn on pins on Raspberry Pi boards, which means it can activate LEDs and magnetic locks. I came up with 4 ideas.

Play the right thing on the piano

A midi piano is hooked up to pd. Mtof from midi keyboard to osc. Put an object between keyboard and mtof that sorts the right notes. If wrong note play sound file. Create tab array that reads incoming notes. If in right order keep reading them, if not discard and start again. If note order is hit, play a victory sound. BONUS - and unlock maglock 1 - edit - set it to any incoming audio using pitch detection

Bird puzzle

There are 4 audio sources and 4 microphones. Each audio source (set up around a room, ideally) is playing ambient jungle noises, slightly different (idea - start at random point in audio file, OR have a huge number of ambient sounds that are triggered randomly). There is also audio of one bird that is out of place - a loon. The loon only plays out of one speaker at a time. Microphones are set up near the speakers. There is one button set up near each speaker as well. Check audio in for each of those speakers. If volume level hits a certain point AND the loon is playing out of that speaker, trigger a wing flapping noise and a few moments later start the sound at another speaker. If the loon is playing out of the speaker and the player is able to hit the button, they ‘capture’ the bird and a victory sound is played (and a maglock unlocks?)

Chu chu chu

A rhythm game type puzzle - simple beat to metronome with clapping at certain times - player has to hit it near those times in second measure

Telephone bros

There are 4 sets of headphones with single ear pieces. At each of these stations is a series of buttons. You can hear a bunch of voices coming out of each ear piece. Press and hold one button and you’ll hear one get louder and the rest get quieter. Each earpiece has a separate part of a short sentence from each voice, IE the sentence: “You need to pick up the red pot and put it in the bottom shelf of the refrigerator” - speaker 1 will be playing “You need ___ red_____it in____shelf___”. The gaps are filled in with the other speakers. The intention is that a group of players has to speak it aloud as they hear it, or that one player has a notebook and pieces it together themselves.

These make sense to me, at least. I started working on the first 2.

PIANO PUZZLE

For the piano puzzle, I chose Zelda’s Lullaby from Ocarina of Time because I played that game a bunch when I was younger. I connected a midi keyboard to Pure Data and grabbed the incoming midi values, converting them to sound using a simple oscillator and basic note start and end using delay values into the volume multiplier. I chose to make this an ‘easy mode’ puzzle, where the only notes that play audio are the 4 notes necessary to play the song. The rest of the notes play an ‘error’ sound. This was achieved using the select object. (MIDI sends the note value twice - once when pressing the note down, once when releasing. The spigot button prevented it from sending the note during the release, meaning that it only played the error sound once.)

To get the patch to recognize when I played the melody properly, I initially tried to get it to record incoming values to an array. I wasn’t sure how to properly reset the array, or how to compare it against an array with the proper values, so I abandoned the idea. I still believe that this would be the best and most accurate way to work the puzzle, but I just don’t have enough knowledge and experience with Pure Data to get it to work.

The messier way to get it to work was through a series of gates. If you played one note correctly, it ‘opened the door’ to the next gate. If you played that note correctly, the next gate opened, etc. I achieved this using a series of select and spigot objects.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t check the ‘wrong’ number at every gate (select object), because it was still checking every number that passed through. My workaround was to only have it turn off every gate if the FINAL note press was incorrect. This worked, mostly. It still occasionally sends a reset value when I don’t intend it to, and I’m not sure why. The patch mostly works though.

pianopuzzle.pd

youtube

BIRD PUZZLE

The bird puzzle is still in progress. This version is not working.

I grabbed a (cc0) field recording of a rainforest from freesounds.org. I edited the file 3 times, changing the start and end time and making them loop. I like working with readsf~ because it’s so straightforward compared to a tabread~, so if there’s work I can do in an audio editor first instead of Pure Data I’ll do that. I set all of them playing simultaneously from different speakers.

I chose a loon for the bird, as loons are from North America and wouldn’t normally be heard in a jungle (even though they’re associated with a jungle in public consciousness). I figured the easiest way to make it heard in one speaker rather than another was to have it playing out of all the speakers and just control the volume.

You can see that at load it should only come out of the first speaker.

I monitored the input volume of a microphone using the env~ object. I placed a spigot after that to be able to control when the microphone was actually affecting anything. If the volume goes over a certain amount, it triggers a flapping noise in that speaker, and also changes the active bird speaker to one of the other 3.

For some reason, the mic will still create a bang when the env~ value is over the desired input, even if the spigot is ‘turned off’. I’m not sure why. There are a few other quirks with how it’s working, and there aren’t ‘capture’ buttons set up yet.

If I’m going to teach this, I’ll have to work out the errors and get it functioning.

birdpuzzle.pd

youtube

#pure data #escape room #audio puzzles

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