Hello,
I have absolutely no concpet or idea of how any of this works really,
I am a multimedia student in Dundalk Institute of Technology Ireland,
And the project I am trying to create goes a little like this...

the user walks into "this" room,
"this" room, not literally the computer room in our house,
"this" being the porject installation for the exhibition day,
where they sit in front of a moniter and answer a series of questions,
through a control form that still isnt really decided yet,
were actually now thinking about making our own controllers,
using fader/sliders sort of controls,
although not as analogue, they would act as simple switches or buttons,
sliding it up fully to make a choice or that.
the interface will be designed on director,
this being the program our interface designer is most comfortable with
and on this the questions will appear and be answered,
and it should be able to store all the collected information in some form of database,

There's like 4 different series of questions,
IQ/Logic, Personality, Attitude and Emmotion,
each with about 10questions except for the logic which will be time and score based and contain puzzles and the likes.
Anyway this gathered information then is kinda translated,
into what we hope to be like a 40second or so melody.
Different answers all have a different outcome,
not as simple as just piling on a load of different samples,
but more piling together different musical elements,
like one persons could have a time signature of 3:4 or 4:4 or 11:8 or whatever,
and the scales involved, the key its in, the tempo,
the amount of layers, and the instruments in each,
the amount of notes per bar and the length certain notes should be,
the majority of questions and what they should be reflective of musically is
actually almost complete in its research actually,
the problem Im facing is sending this information on to something that will automatically produce this melody,
"Pure Data", is what has been recommended to me by lecturers in the music department,
but to be honest Im not managing very well,
Im trying to work through tutorials at the moment,
and theres alot expected off me in the next few days,
and in the event of this not working for me am supposed to have some other alternative?
Personally what I hoped to do, is just like have all these things,
elements of the melody that is,
to be able to be input into some sort of sequencer,
like if the melody is to be at a tempo of 130 or whatever than thats added to the track,
and whatever the other details are there added to the new track too,
and then its ready,
but is anything like that possible with any software sequencers that your aware of,
or to do something like that would it involve reprogramming things or what,
like you know the way on one of these programs like reason or whatever,
you can humanly set all these charactoristics for the tune,
can you have it so that this information is sent on to a program like this,
and interprets and arranges all the material for you in this way?
Ive managed to download one such sequencer arranger program,
I think it even has the ability to perhaps record some of my own sounds into it too,
tiz called Ableten Live 7
http://www.ableton.com/live

Does anyone know how to achieve... easily rather than hard, what it is am trying to do here any replys welcome, thank you Gav

Hmm, the project sounds interesting, a melody for each personality.

You need to take your time over this one. If your tutor thinks this is something that can be done in a few days I'd say that's a terrible underestimate. Did you leave it to the deadline... tsk!

What you need is a melody generator with a number of parameters. You need less parameters than there are variables in your test results (to do it simply) and some way of reducing the test results to a smaller set of melodies.

First convert the test results to numeric values.

Then apply these to a mapping that converts the scores to parameters making music you think suits each personality.

Create a few formulas, one for each generator parameter that maps the test results onto a factor for each generation control.

For example;

Do you wear black and lthink the Cure are the best band eva (YN)? Y

We will

a) Rock you [0]
Overcome [0]
c) Stay in tonight, because I haven't got a stitch to wear [X]

The Police are

a) Doing their best to balance law and order with the liberal values of a post industial society [0]
Fascist tools of an opressive regime [0]
c) The best rock/pop trio of the 1980s [X]

maps onto

Introvert-extrovert : Shoegazing emo depressiveness 6
Motivation: Rocking Godhead attitude 1
Individuality- conformity : Sheep factor 5
Humour/lightness : Slack factor 6

which maps onto

Tempo 110
Scale - 70% minor 30% major
Change factor 8
Liveliness factor 4

Because the problem is complex and involves data collection, scaling, mapping and generation my advice would be to keep everything VERY simple. Melodies with a choice of four or five note parameters, in simple patterns, keep the number of questions to 8 or less.

Start by building a melody generator that has something like the following properties

1. tempo
2. scale division
3. liveliness (change magnitude)
4. Density (rests vs notes)

Then come back with that to show us and a list of your questions and explanation of how you interpret the scores.

Hmmm.....
First, is there a reason to build a switch/slider interface instead of using a traditional keyboard/mouse at the computer?

For the data transfer, director could use the FiliIO Xtra to write to a text file, then PD could read in and parse the text file.

I think the rest was covered in the last post

Though a keyboard and mouse would be much easier; If the custom controller sent MIDI data it is fairly easy to read MIDI in and it is already in numerical format which could help to simplify the process.

Like obi pointed out this sounds like a pretty big project but there are some very cool procedural soundmaking options inside PD which could help simplify things.

Obi: do you really wear black and think the cure are the best band ever?

As for the matter of building something like that. It could be acheived quite easily with arduino, or if its just buttons that are required, hacking an old keyboard, and hooking up some switches to it, and using the keystrokes as triggers.

edit: by "that" i meant the interface which was being referred to 2 posts earlier.

> Obi: do you really wear black and think the cure are the best band ever?

ROFLMAO!!! er......
well......

If you met me 20 years ago then the answer would be different. Somewhere in history I'm walking around with a crushed velvet jacket and a mop of hair

As for input devices...

I saw some of those big red nuclear USB buttons going cheap somewhere. Would probably make an easy YES/NO system.