MellowTron - Dynamic Multiple Sample Playback for Musical Theatre Applications

MellowTron was designed per the request of a musical theatre company for their production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. In order to facilitate audio playback in a hostile space (not a theatre/concert hall), a patch that could quickly read in a large amount of audio files, list them in any order the user desires, and play them back in an efficient manner triggered by MIDI controller was required. In this case an AKAI MPK Mini 25-key was utilized.

The patch utilizes a specialized abstraction that uses most of the features of the polybuffer~ object. This allows for fast read in of a folder and the ability to reorder samples through a coll object. From there, the samples are read in through the KeyAssign subpatch, which allows for immediate assignment of samples to keys on the MPK. Use of the stripnote object allows for Start/Stop capability without holding down the key while the sample is playing. The next step in the project is to integrate UDP control of projections through jitter.