Real Time Polar Coordinate Vector Audio Manipulator 1.01

Real Time Polar Coordinate Vector Audio Manipulator is more of an experiment than a proper, fully-fledged audio program.

Its based on an example program in Charles Petzolds Programming Windows (fifth ed.), called Connect, which basically acts in the same way, but without any sound, user configurable colours etc.

Basically, RTPCVAM gives you a big white drawing area, onto which you can place a number of points by clicking the left mouse button. As long as the button is held down (and you have reached the maximum no. points),
moving the mouse will continue to drop points on the drawing area. Its when you let go of the button that the fun starts though...

Letting go of the mouse button causes the program to start joining up every point to every other point, and the program will start outputting sound. How the sound is output depends on the current line being drawn. Basically, the program calculates the length of the line, and its angle (i.e. the polar coordinates), and plays a section of the specified sound (the length of the section is determined by the length of the line), pitching it according to the lines angle.

This process is repeated for every single line drawn, resulting in what is probably best described as a cacophony (though an interesting cacophony, in
my opinion).

You can load any wave file you like as a sound source, although beware of using sounds that arent 44100Hz, 16-bit and mono. The program should load them, but the audio engine isnt very sophisticated, and will just play them as if they were 44100Hz, 16-bit and mono (i.e. itll sound pretty stupid...).

Dont worry if you dont have any wave files though, on start-up the program fills its buffer with a 440Hz sine wave, which can give interesting results on its own. Its usually a good idea to have the sample volume slider set to about
half way (depending on the sound source), as the way the sounds overlap almost always leads to a certain amount of clipping if you leave it at higher values.

As well, you should be careful about giving the program longer wave files, because this means the program will spend longer playing the sound for each line.

The only other thing of note is the Byte Order radio buttons. These should really have ended up in the group box with the wave file loader, but there wasnt room. Basically, they just change which order the program reads the bytes of the input wave file (this option is included because I couldnt remember which way it works on PCs/Intel machines - I think its left byte first...).