I am terribly sorry that I didn't make it to the help session.
I was really looking forward to it, but I got very sick this weekend.
But I looked over the notes and I think I might be able to put something
together. As for what I did last week, I've ordered an Arduino board,
an infrared proximity sensor and an ultrasonic range finder. I really hope I got the
right products. I found out that the IPS 's range is 10-80 cm, so I
could use it for volume. It outputs varying voltage depending on
distance (3.1V at 10cm to 0.4V at 80cm). URF's output is varying voltage
in one inch increments -- 10mV/inch-- so I will have discrete values for
pitch. Its range is up to almost 7 meters, which is way more than I
will need.

I plan to buy some materials to make the actual frame from Home Depot
(that should be the easy stuff) and basically wait for my products to
arrive.

Some questions and/or issues that I have are:
1. How does Arduino board deal with analog voltage input?
All the programming examples I looked at are getting reading in
of just values from 0-1023, there is no mention of voltage.

2. Does Arduino output serial data or MIDI data? I know it's basically
the same thing, but I was trying to rule out the use of the computer
altogether, and just to plug it into a synth. Would that be possible
with serial data, or would I have to run it through a MAX patch?

3. How would I put it all together?