[PD] Sending data from PD to another program

[Jared]

I'm continuing to work on my Choose Your Own Adventure piece. In this, 
story paths will be chosen by the audience, who vote using instruments 
with two notes (xylophones). PD will analyze the audio input and figure 
out if more people voted for path 1 or 2, depending on which frequency 
is louder.

I'm planning to display the vote choices so the audience can see them 
and, following the vote, which choice won. It might look something like 
this:

  (before the vote)
  CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
  Should they...
      Go into the house?
      Go around back?

  (the audience votes)
  (PD finds note 1 was louder than 2)

  (after the vote)
  CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
  They decide to go into the house!

I have very approximate version of the voting working in PD but am 
unsure how to do the visual output. What I'd like to do is have PD send 
the vote information (that is, who won) to another program, either 
something I'll write or PowerPoint or the like, to run the display.

I know PD can do visual output through Gem, but in exploring Gem I 
couldn't figure out an easy way to have the branching paths work, 
whereas branching paths in PowerPoint or in a homemade program could be 
relatively easy. Likewise, through searching the email archive, most of 
the information I could find on communication between PD and other 
programs was on sending data *to* PD, rather than *from* PD. If there's 
a thread in the archive or a manual/guide explaning what I'm looking 
for, I'd be happy to read through it if someone points me in the right 
direction.

I've attached the current file I'm working on, which contains a more 
in-depth explanation of what I'm doing and what I'd like to do. This 
list has been extremely helpful so far and I'd love any further input 
and advice.

Thanks again for all your time,
-Jared
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: audio_voting.pd
URL: <http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/attachments/20070505/6d3f0d4d/attachment.asc>