Interactive Musical Video System: Week 5 Update

This week I was able to experiment with the Dubler Studio Kit and practice drums more for my thesis demonstration. I started experimenting with creating triggers from words to switch between videos such as saying “red” into the Dubler Studio microphone to play a reddish video or “blue” to play a blueish video. This worked okay for one-syllable words as the Dubler software is meant to sample short percussive beatboxing or percussion notes each one syllable in length. However, I would often have to repeat the word a few times to trigger the MIDI note I wanted. In addition, triggering videos by mapping notes created through the Dubler software consistently caused Ableton Live to crash. I think this is because mapping MIDI notes to Max for Live devices (Zwobot) through a brand new third-party software (the Dubler software) can make Ableton Live very unstable. I concluded that I have to use more percussive beatbox sounds in the Dubler software trigger system to map MIDI notes generated from my voice into Ableton Live. This is because using words is not reliable, but I was able to more successfully say ”go” to play a video and ”stop” to pause the video playing. Another result of this process was that I am starting to learn basic beatboxing sounds to more efficiently use the Dubler Studio Kit and for sampling and sound design purposes.

Regarding voice pitch detection in the Dubler software, I have read people’s experiences who are unsuccessful in holding sustained MIDI notes, while other reviews are more positive. I have been unsuccessful in using the pitch detection feature effectively, but have seen that the solution is to only detect one key signature narrowing down the possible detectable notes. In turn, I may try tweaking some settings to fix this problem.

I wanted to see if there were any other MIDI controllers that did have speech recognition and found Imitone, a microphone MIDI controller similar to the Dubler Studio Kit, but it is still in development. I am still eager to see how Imitone gets used when it is released, and what unique features it has.