Here’s my BOM/loose visual of how everything is going to be connected. This might be overly simply as I haven’t indicated the necessarily wiring, but I think setting it out all as simple is a welcome way to perceive the project, since it seemed more complicated in my head. This simplifies it—I basically have an input (the potentiometers) whose values are read by my computer. The computer then translates those values into an output, resulting in sound from the speaker. The motors then follow suit from the translated values from the computer and move in accordance with sound production, so this means there will be a lot of translation for my computer to do, and likely a lot of software moving parts.
Moving onto the MIDI lab:
I set everything up and got the initial sequence of MIDI output. After that, I had my board set up for human control, and this is where I ran into a few problems. My values were being read by the arduino program, but the notes changing. In fact, when I closed the arduino app, my computer was still emitting the same note. I think I’ve done something terribly wrong, but I’m really struggling to figure out what exactly.