For my final project me and Yining Shi (http://www.yining1023.com/) are going to make and installation with music and lights.
The installation consist in 7 lamps ( music notes C D E F G A B ), that turn on and play a note when the user touch them. We also wanted to have another input through a microphone, so when somebody pitch the right note one of the lamps will turn on depending on the pitch of the voice.
PICTURE DIAGRAM;
Here’s the video of a circuit that turns on LED and plays a tone using the capacitance library in arduino.
http://vimeo.com/110279888
After presenting the project to our classmates and doing some software research we ended with the following conclusions:
1- The two inputs (touching and singing) may confuse the user understanding the installation.
2- Some users don’t like to sing in public no matter what the cause is for.
3- We need a provocative design for the lights so the users know he/she has to touch them to interact with them.
4- Max MSP is a friendly software to use when your using sound, so our tones will be controlled by this software.
5- LED are not bright enough, and working with 120V could be risky, so we will work with 12V lamps, and control them with arduino.
Great! Thank you for posting this. For the notes I actually think you might be able to do it all in Arduino rather than Max/Msp and I agree that starting with one interaction might be best and then you can see how to add the other functionality without confusing the user but enhancing the experience.