As part of my fellowship work, I explored various ways of doing sound on a multitouch table. Initially, I had proposed something loop-based with tactile instruments: a sequencing and synthesis tool. Though fun to play with, this didnʼt match closely enough with what was needed, so I went to the opposite extreme: a visual programming language for audio signal processing. Mixupp (as it was now called) used a LISP-like syntax and allowed a user to nest trees of functions, collapse those trees with a gesture, and reorient those trees as they pleased. I tried several different prototypes of this before deciding that it was approaching a local minimum.
After discovering that the fun of a paper LISP language—dragging functions around, sliding bits of paper on a table—was lost in the translation to a digital prototype, I had to ask “why?” The conclusion I came to was that the looseness of paper was the thing that made it satisfying; the digital prototype I had built had specific slots into which arguments of functions had to go, and each tree would perform an automatic layout operation on its contents to keep everything looking proper. This, I am sure, was the reason it felt so mechanical and false.
For my next project, I wanted to do something looser and freer—something that expressed the essential nature of a signal processing graph or patch bay without enforcing any kind of rigidity. Mixupp-Sweep is an exploration of drawing out “signals” from “tracks”, drawing faders on the table and assigning them values, and using tagged objects to change the filter assigned to a fader. It feels much different, much more expressive, and much better overall.