FINAL EXPERIMENT
QUARTZ COMPOSER
DRIP ³
My final for quartz is an extension of my week 3 third experiment, ‘DRIP’, which featured a particle system that followed the mouse and reacted to audio input. It created an effect almost like a pixelated dripping stream of water, but when revisiting it, I felt like I could take the idea and refine it further. I liked the physics of the first particle system I made for ‘DRIP’, with a high particle count and two math patches controlling the min and max particle size, but it looked the best when the particle stream was stationary, so I removed the mouse patch and decided to focus much more heavily on audio input reactivity. To do this, I added two more particle systems, or water sources in the case of this experiment, that I wanted to react differently to audio. Since there are plenty of inputs in the particle system patch to experiment with, I messed around with the gravity, attraction, and Y min and max velocity, but I didn’t like the results they produced when paired up with the audio input patch. For the second water source, I settled on hooking up the particle count input to the volume peak output on the audio patch, so the louder the audio, the more particles were created. I wanted to keep the particle count low to start off with, so this stream looked like only a few droplets of water were created when you make a sound. The third stream of water was a little harder to decide how I wanted it to react uniquely to sound, but I settled on linking the particle systems X position input to the volume peak output. To make this effect work I had to use an extra math patch to move the final X position over by 0.4 after it had been connected to the volume peak. This means that when you create sound, the stream moves slightly to the right.
With all 3 particle system water streams reacting uniquely to audio input, I think this is a fun interactive experience.
