Arduino & Max/MSP — Sophia Su

The Flow Deck
2024

The Flow Deck is a Digital Music Instrument Design Project done using Arduino and Max/MSP. Two sensors were implemented in an empty playing card box - an MPU 6050 accelerometer and a button. It is a hand-controlled instrument capable of manipulating the timbre of the ambient music that was programmed in the Max patch.

There are four sets of notes with different tones stored in message boxes in Max that can be switched between with the button. The patch then reads three values from the movement of the accelerometer in the card box when it’s connected to Arduino: Yaw, Pitch, and Roll. These three values control the center frequency, gain, and the Q value of a filtergraph that is attached to the output. The same three values also changes three parameters of the Valhalla Supermassive VST plugin: Mix, DelayWarp, and ModRate. Another crucial part of the patch is that the section in the top right corner is randomly choosing an envelope shape from the 9 presets to change the ADSR of the sound.

The Max/MSP Code

The Arduino Code (created by Electronic Cats) uses several online libraries specifically for MPU 6050 such as I2Cdev.h. One modification to the code was recalculating the yaw, pitch, and roll values by adding 180 to the function (by Troy Cruz) so that there is no negative values being read when the accelerometer is turned the opposite direction.

The Arduino Code

The Wiring Documentation

The project aims to explore the reciprocal relationship between bodily movements and sounds. Wearing this device allows more interaction between the body and the ambient music it’s creating. The future expectation is to expand this into a two-hand device and to experiment with more rhythmic and percussion-heavy sounds.

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