The Virtual Music Generator

For this project, I decided to make an interactive music generator that would work with an external camera like a webcam. The project file consists of  2 max patch files:

  • The Camera Module

  • A Pattern recognizer Module

The camera module consists of functionalities that make use of the webcam. It captures the user's gestures and does some computations for detecting motion within the view field. The view field of the webcam is divided into different zones. When the user moves around in front of the webcam, the different zones get triggered based on where the motion is detected. Each of the zones has a keyboard module with a specific Chord major scale attached to the patcher.

There are 4 internal keyboard patches:

  • C major scale generator

  • D major scale generator

  • E major scale generator

  • F major scale generator

The four major scale generators in themselves have a bunch of functionalities built into it. To build out each of these modules, I had to do a bunch of research and learn about music theory and how chords work and about scales, etc. Once I got a rough understanding of what these things mean, I had to figure out how I can actually use this in my project. I even used the theory of diatonic harmonics for the C major keyboard module but don't end up using it for the other major scale modules just to keep things a little more edgy and out of the norm. After building out the logic for the harmonics and the midi kslider interpreter, I had to do them 5 more times for each of the scales. This required mapping it out and then providing logic to scale the midi values up or down randomly depending on which zone is triggered by the user.


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Algorithmic Music Composition