ohal

i am working on an installation in which the sound of the room is recorded when it is noisy, and when the room goes quite one of the sounds previously recorded are played back.

i thought that the challenge will be to write a sort of an "if" statement to let Max know when it is noisy enough to start recording and when to stop, but my main problem is how to automate the buffer~ object to create a constantly evolving bank of sounds of undetermined length, and have them play back continuously until Max get the signal to stop.

i am probably thinking about this in the wrong terms and thus not really sure how to solve this. i imagine this:

room ambiance is loud --> Max gets a signal to begin recording

buffer~ starts recording a sound file of an undetermined length 

room ambiance goes quite --> buffer~ stops recording 

buffer~ saves the recorded sound as 1.aif

when the room gets loud again Max gets the signal to stop 1.aif playback and begin recording once again. buffer~ begins recording and when time comes saves an additional file: 2.aif

upon playback now there will be two sounds in the bank to randomly choose from, but if Max doesn't get the signal to start recording again, the playback of the sound will loop until it does.

i know that this is a lot, but if some one has a patch that does something similar or an advice on how to go about this

i am working on an installation in which the sound of the room is recorded when it is noisy, and when the room goes quite one of the sounds previously recorded are played back. 

room ambiance is loud --> Max gets a signal to begin recording
buffer~ starts recording a sound file of an undetermined length 
room ambiance goes quite --> buffer~ stops recording 
buffer~ saves the recorded sound as 1.aif
buffer~ begins playing back 1.aif

when the room gets loud again Max gets the signal to stop 1.aif playback and begin recording once again. buffer~ begins recording and when time comes saves an additional file: 2.aif
upon playback now there will be two sounds in the bank to randomly choose from, but if Max doesn't get the signal to start recording again, the playback of the sound will loop until it does.

i know that this is a lot, but if some one has a patch that does something similar or an advice on how to go about this
i'd really appreciate it,

automated-buffer-sound-bank

I started working on the playback section of the patch (accessing the sound back and playing a random sound file) with sfplay~ as you suggested. It is working fine more or less but I still feel that the way i constructed it is a lot more complicated than it is supposed to be.

If you have time, could you take a look at the patch?

I'd love to get input on it and see how someone who is not a novice would go about doing it.

Hi Stefan,
Thanks for your reply!
I started working on the playback section of the patch (accessing the sound back and playing a random sound file) with sfplay~ as you suggested. It is working fine more or less but I still feel that the way i constructed it is a lot more complicated than it is supposed to be.
If you have time, could you take a look at the patch?
I'd love to get input on it and see how someone who is not a novice would go about doing it.
Thanks so much!
Ohal

If your soundfiles really are named 1.aif, 2.aif etc you could use [sprintf open %ld.aif] instead of the whole [gate] section of your patch. You can send it your random number and it will generate your file name and you just need to trigger the playback. If you are using files with different names you could always load them in a [coll] and use your [random] to select an index, [prepend open] and go from there. I hope this helps.

Hi lh,
[sprintf] worked great!
Here is the revised version,
Thanks!

I am trying to figure out a way to trigger sfplay~ according to another sound source amplitude: if it goes below a certain threshhold it turns sfplay~ on and if it exceeds the threshhold it turns splay~ off.

The way I did it doesn't work great and is sort of clumsy as it is. If anyone has any input for how to make it better i'd love to hear it.

automated buffer~ sound bank