WiiWah demo from Donald Delmar Davis on Vimeo.
Collin Oldham came over before my gig in Spokane last month and brought a couple of patches and a few ideas on how to set up an effects chain using pure data. One of them was a patch using something called a “Formant” filter.
Wah.
I am not going to even pretend to understand it. But when I actually got to where I could play with it, it was really subtle and I didn’t like it. Then Collin explained that it needed some harmonics to work well.
Crunchy
Lucky for me Jason (breedx) showed me a really nice technique for getting distortion. Its still not as nice as my gz2 but its a pretty good demo of some of what can be done very easily in pure data.
Combining the two creates a really nice wah that is very vowel like as you can hear in the video above.
Connecting the Wiimote to pd on a mac.
My first attempt to connect to pd using the wii was using an OSC connection called musiccontroller using my intel mac. It worked though had the same issues that darwin remote has where in order to reconnect the wiimote to the you had to manually delete the binding that osx creats for the wiimote in the bluetooth control panel. The show stopper though was that it did not run on the machine I am targeting which is running tiger on a PPC.
Looking at alternatives I found a program called OSCulator which has ability to map multiple input sources and wiimotes, connects to the wiimote consistantly and with very little intervention and it has an extremely flexible mapping system for both osc and midi (though I never did get the osc part to work). It was however was neither open source nor free.
The solution I wound up with both simple and straight forward. It uses an open source application called wiitomidi and OSX’s IAC loopback device.
The pd source for all the patches put together is attached here. (http://dorkbotpdx.org/files/wiiwah.tgz)
