For my experimental digital art class at Georgia Tech, I created this toy I call SoundPen. It’s a very basic version obviously (although I think some cool things could come from this idea).

The basic idea is to create music by clicking your mouse and placing balls that will bounce of the screen. There are 3 different types of balls (click and press either A, S, or D).

I used Jeff Swartz’s algorithm to change pitch of the sounds from the vertical balls. The more left the ball is on the screen the lower the pitch while the more right on the screen the higher the pitch.

Please be careful when using. If you place too many balls your computer might slow down rapidly. If you want to remove the last ball just press the backspace.

There are probably ways I could have fixed that problem (for example, using lower level PixelBender capabilities to process the sound); however, I don’t think it matters too much. You don’t want to put too many balls anyway because you’ll just hear noise.

(Be sure you have Flash 10!)