event
Synthux Hackathon 2023

Light-Reactive Shrieking Bunny

A bunny that is terrified of the dark and shrieks when you turn the lights off.
Daisy seed microcontroller
MaxMSP
Light sensor
Potentiometer
prompt
A humanised algorithm
category
Performance instrument

Coaches & collaborators

institute
California Institute of the Arts
This is Bucket, the shrieking bunny-sizer. If you put him in the dark or stroke his forehead, his inner oscillator circuit fires, crying tears of fear. We programmed bucket's oscillator program using Max/gen~ and flashed it to the daisy via Oopsy. The parameters of the oscillator are controlled using three potentiometers and a photosensor. The photosensor can be controlled by the lights or by a player's hand like a theremin. When there is little light, the bunny becomes audible and the potentiometers can be used to manipulate the bunny's timbre.
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the tech

How does it work?

Three 10k potentiometers were connected to the gen~ program running on the Daisy Seed. We flashed our custom oscillator program using the "oopsy.patch_sm" object. The photosensor controlled the final gain of the oscillator gen~ patch, which we scaled inversely and exponentially to provide fine control. The pot signals were scaled and sent to two "cycle" object frequencies, which were distorted and multiplied by each other. These ratios were controlled by the pots, as well as the distortion amount (which ended up acting like a lowpass filter of sorts).
Open source code
Click here to grab this project's code
Daisy seed microcontroller
A powerful microcontroller for synthesis programmed through C++, Arduino, Pure data and Max MSP
MaxMSP
Visual programming language for music and multimedia
Light sensor
A light sensor detects light in its proximity
Potentiometer
Adjustable resistor that can control the amount of electric current flowing through a circuit.
About the instrument
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