Math

So, I use math like an untrained songwriter uses music theory.  I've got a basic feel of how it goes, I have a general feeling of how it works, and I just keep on trying until something pops out that makes sense.  That's how my research this week went.  At first I was going about it very officially.  The sensor I'm using outputs XYZ data in various forms, but the one that seemed to make the most sense was the Euler angles.  I researched Euler, pronounced 'oiler' as in Edmonton ( a nod to our Canadian colleagues, who in the PAT department are legion), who I'd never heard of, but is to Mathematicians what Charlie Parker is to sax players, or what Claude Shannon is to tech folks.  I tried to understand how to calculate coordinates on a sphere, I reread all my trig, I poured over math blogs.  No luck, I just couldn't make the connection.  I ended up spending a lot of time using my hand to represent the planes and thinking about it over and over again.  As I played with the Bucky a little, looking at the data on the screen, a feeling (not an understanding) started to come to me; there was a correlation and I just had to find out what it was.  My data on the x plane was tied to magnetic north, so I wasn't interested in that because it needs to work no matter what direction it's pointed when someone picks it up.  But the Y and Z planes were both in the range of -40 to 40.  I decided to scale them down to a range of -1 to 1 and have a look.  I realized that they were reporting in Cartesian numbers, even though they were angles; it must be some derivative that I'm not aware of.  So, if you hold out your hand, the y axis stretches from pinky to thumb and the z goes from fingertips to wrist.  The combination of the two creates a vector from origin, which is just what I needed to establish a position for the data! Way more simple that coming up with some trig monstrosity that ate cycles and scramble brain cells.  So here is a video of the control I was able to find:



The 'map' you see on the screen is actually a sound field map  of an ambisonic encoder, so I've made my first step in having a Ambisonic Controller.  Cheers!