Sam Scaife - Digital Media Design BA

As I would like to build some form of device to feed data to my visualisation I have order myself an Arduino Uno. But until that arrieves I throught it would be a good idea to see if I could build a quick prototype in processing which would graphically display the volume of a mic input. I decided to ignore the web limitations for now as I had no idea how easy it would be to put together.

I used Minium, a sound library for processing. Which I discovered records the volume from the left and right channel with a value between 0 and 1. This meant that with a very small amount of code I was able to create a simple visualisation which changed the colour of a circle based on the volume.

// load libaries
import ddf.minim.*;

// minium vars
Minim minim;
AudioInput input;

void setup(){

size(500,500);
smooth();
noStroke();
colorMode(HSB);

minim = new Minim(this);
input = minim.getLineIn();

}

void draw() {

background(0);
fill(volume(),255,255);
ellipse(width/2,height/2,100,100);

println(input);

}

float volume() {

return(input.mix.get(1)*1000);
}

void stop(){

input.close();
minim.stop();

super.stop();
}

even with something simple like this if you where to have a large amount of them positioned relative to there location you would get a really interesting image