HW 7: Singing Balls

PAT 204/504: Creative Coding (Fall 2025)

Due at 11:59pm ET on November 26

Instructions

• Please submit both your code and a short demo video. You will receive zero credit if the code is missing.
• All assignments must be completed on your own. You are welcome to exchange ideas with your peers, but this should be in the form of concepts and discussion, not in the form of writing and code.
• Provide proper citations/references for any external resources you use in your writing and code.
• Submit your work to Gradescope.
• Late submissions will be accepted for up to a week with 1 point deducted per day.

Q1: Singing MIDI Balls (5pt)

In this assignment, you’ll be implementing a bouncing ball MIDI synth with both Processing and Max. When we click at the canvas, a ball should drop with gravity, bounce back with a decay, and make a MIDI sound through sending an OSC message to Max/MSP whenever the ball hits the ground. The MIDI pitch should be determined by the x-position of the ball. The MIDI velocity should be determined by the size of the ball, which would be randomly assigned. It’s up to you to set the decay to a constant or a variable that depends on the ball size (in the video below, the larger tha ball, the less bouncy it is).

Please submit both your Max patch and a video recording demonstrating your work. You will receive zero credit if the code is missing. Zoom can be a good option for recording.

Q2: Singing FM Balls (5pt)

Now, let’s makes some sounds with the FM polysynth you built for HW 6.

Please submit both your Max patch and a video recording demonstrating your work. You will receive zero credit if the code is missing. Zoom can be a good option for recording.

Hints

• This example Ball.pde could be a good starting point.
• You’ll likely want to check a ball’s speed after it bounces to see if the ball is dead so that it stops making sounds.
• Note that the poly object only takes integer inputs. If you want to convert a floating number into an integer, you can connect a float to an integer box to convert it to an int in Max.