The delayStick

After going thru’ tutorials, I realised that I wasn’t really that interested with synthesis sound as created with sine and sawtooth waves but more interested in manipulating existing sound. As in a previous post, I remember seeing a guy visiting iDAT who had this bag of gas that you squeezed to produce sound and he wanted to do the same but use live street sounds which I thought was pretty cool. In the patch I used delays primarily because that was the effect that I understood fairly quickly. The patch might not look particularly sophisticated but by waving and twisting the stick, you get some interesting effects.

The delayStick has 5 tilt switches at one end of a tube arranged at different angles to form an array. Because the tilt switches activate at an angle of 10 degress from rest, by having them like that allows them to activate at different times when the tube is moved around. The tilt switches are connected to a circuit board from an old PS/2 keyboard and generate a keypress when tilted. The ascii value of the keypress is then used to calculate the amount of delay to put onto the audio feed.

Download Max/MSP patch file

Download source text file

Watch Quicktime movie of delayStick in action (3MB)