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Artist: Vincent Isabel
Artist Contact/Social Media: Email: [email protected] Instagram: @4rtvisa
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For this project, I played with a mixture of live sounds and digital sounds. The core mechanic was an ongoing looping sequence, which I would activate and deactivate with my arm movements. Other movements would bend the loop’s pitch and change a delay effect. The digital sounds were a combination of additive sound synthesis, where the waveform was determined by the camera input, the volume was affected by my arm, and the pitch by a temperature sensor.= There are a lot of different details to break down, so here is an attempt at clarifying this spaghetti of a patch!
Camera data: The camera input was mapped onto 4 different sound waves [see purple section in audio patch], making additive sound synthesis oscillation. Each sound wave’s volume was determined by the ratio of black and white pixels of each quadrant of the video input. The webcam was connected to Max/MSP with a USB cable, and my iPhone camera was connected via Apple’s continuity share feature [see camera patch].
Camera patch, screenshot by Vincent Isabel, 2026
Temperature data:
The frequency of the oscillation produced with the camera input was controlled by the temperature sensed by the temperature sensor. For example, in the performance I would put the sensor in boiling water to get the oscillator’s frequency higher, and then in my mouth to lower it. The temperature sensor was reading data, connected to an ESP32 microcontroller. Then, the ESP32 would send the sensor’s data to Max/MSP on my computer via OSC messages over Wi-Fi [see blue section in audio patch].
Audio patch, screenshot by Vincent Isabel, 2026
Movement data:
The movement data was an important part of the performance’s function, since it was the main connection of the system to my body. I crafted a bracelet with an embedded Arduino RP2040. This microcontroller has an internal IMU sensor, which means it can track the tilt angle of my wrist and its velocity, on all X, Y, and Z axes. The tilt is calculated by an accelerometer (aX, aY, aZ) and the velocity by a gyroscope (gX, gY, gZ). The Arduino would then send the data to Max/MSP via Wi-Fi, similarly to the ESP32.
I mapped a few behaviors of my wrist to parameters of the looping module in the Max patch (see green section in audio patch). The Y-axis tilt of my wrist would control the volume of the digital oscillator, as well as the delay on the looper, which translated into my arm going up or down, and the X-axis would control the pitch bending of the looper, meaning my hand turning sideways. I also used a threshold on the Z-axis velocity of my arm to trigger the record and stop button of the looper, so when my wrist would travel fast sideways, the button would start/stop. To clear the current loop going on, I used a threshold on the Y-axis velocity of my wrist, which would mean shaking my arm.
Bracelet sensor, photo by Vincent Isabel, 2025
Sound capture:
The Max patch captures sound from a sound card (Scarlett Solo in my case), and a connected microphone (Shure SM28). The audio is routed to the loop, as well as the audio output directly. This ensures that the audio is always heard, even when loop recording is turned off.
Software and hardware used:
Software: