Math question

[Peter Bogdanoff]

Hi,

I’m seriously math deficient.

In my application’s preferences I have a slider that the user can set a value from +5 down to -5, where 0 is the default and the user can then modify that. 

The result is currently linear but I’m thinking that I want finer control around the zero midpoint but coarser results at either end of the control. So I’m needing a non-linear scale of some sort.

This is the current script. tData is a number 5 to -5. 60 was an arbitrary number chosen to provide similar results on the two platforms (a span of 600, which is the timescale of an audio file—I can vary the speed of time events by 1 second):

function calcBlockOffsetGlobal tData
    if the machine contains "x86" then
      put -300 into defaultSetting # Windows default   
   else
      put 80 into defaultSetting # Mac default   
   end if
   put defaultSetting + (60 * tData) into tOffset
   return tOffset
end calcBlockOffsetGlobal


How would one modify this to return tOffset as a smaller change when tData is near zero, and the opposite when tData is near the maximum?

Peter Bogdanoff
UCLA

ps. I saw a t-shirt yesterday that said “Well, another day passed and I didn't use Algebra."