The proposal of this project is to be able to sonify data through sound Spatialization, and give another dimension to data display and/or analysis. This is accomplished by reading common data files into MAX/MSP by using the built in functions that accept text documents.
These documents are plain text versions of spreadsheets created on software such as MS Excel. The format handled by MAX/MSP is Comma Separated Values (CSV), which is just that, values on a column with commas between them. MAX/MSP reads one value at the time, with a rate that can be set through the metro objet that triggers actions every n milliseconds.
By reading this numbers, which can come from different sources, and here the proposal is that scientific experiments’ numbers or data can be saved as CSV files so that they can be read and used on any fashion on the patch done for this occasion. Mapping this data into different parameters of the sound Spatialization system, results on the Sonification of data into a 3D space, so information that relates to space could easily be displayed on this system.
The structure of the patches is such that the CSV files can be directed to frequency of a pure tone, playback speed of an audio file, gain of a given sound, and the X, Y and Z position of it on the virtual space that is rendered through ViMiC. The whole program is intended to enable the mapping of any variable of the system to these input streams (CSV, audio files, noise and sinusoidal).
An important thing to state here is that the MAX/MSP patch reads one-column files only, so, if information is stored on a spreadsheet with correlated columns, they must be saved separately as CSV files, including the extension “.txt” so that they can be identified by the MAX/MSP object that is reading the files.
The set of sub patches used to construct the model by means of working with the concepts and functionalities mentioned above are described in the following sections.
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Further on this chapter:
0. CONTENT
4.2 DATA READING
4.4 STREAM SELECTORS
4.5 SCALERS
4.6 VOLUME MAKER
4.7 DATA READERS
4.8 PHYSICAL LAYER