Ideas

Concept

Now that the concept is completed for this project I thought it might me nice to talk about a couple of other ideas that I would have liked to try implementing if time permitted.

The first would have been to try and create a new appearance by reshaping the grid. The form that I liked the best would have been to make the squares rotate around a centre axis creating a circular appearance.

The other idea was that rather than the shapes only covering the cavas, they could have coved the whole screen, but only been visible through the 'window' of processing. I think it would have been interesting to reveal things that only become visible once dragging occurs

Crash

Concept

The final stage of sound/shape. After experimenting, and as much as I liked the interesting look ellipses can provide I decided to go back to something that more resembled my original design. It just provided the most fluid and interesting appearance. I also asked for feedback from people which suggested as much.

The three sounds have been added so now dragging the canvas initiates the drum roll, crashes of varying volumes and speed are activated depending on speed and there is an ambient lava sound as well. It is amazing how much of a difference these sound make. Now it really feels like you are damaging something.

Unfortunately there appears to be a couple of glitches that I could not fix before it was due. The most irritating is that the explosions sometimes create two sounds instead of one. Still I'm am happy wiht the end product.

Crash - Open Processing Link

 

Sound

Concept

Since this project is primarily about sound, it seemed appropriate to focus on getting it right. Analysis of my work indicated that the three animations of my concept needed sound. Most integral, was the explosion sound that I had located earlier. I edited it so I could provide a different sound depending on speed at which the collision occurs. Next I found a sound for lava and slowed it down. It should provide a nice ambient sound to match the shifting colours.

The last piece of the puzzle was something to match the dragging of the canvas. I liked the idea of building up anticipation and I knew that a drum roll would be an effective way of achieving this. Of course this makes this sound effect the odd-one-out, but I think the tradeoff will be worth it.

Waves

Concept

Now that my application is more developed I can experiment with new effects. This example below changes the shapes to ellipses and has them increasing in size. Although I think this possibly looks nicer than the grid, I don't feel it is as interesting or as well suited to my concept. The experimenting must go on!

Waves - Link to Open Processing

Shimmering

Concept

I'm getting close to a design that fulfils the minim requirements of my original concept. I improved the destruction by making it exponential. Now the damage close to the impact is much larger than the damage further away, which feels much more natural.

The other big change is that the colour now randomly increases or decreases within a small range. This nice small shift makes the concept look like it is shimmering, causing it to look much more fluid and more volcanic. I tried to switch the colour to HSB, but it does not appear to be working as expected. 

Slam - Open Processing Link

Bang!

Concept

This is already a major upgrade over the previous stage of my concept. Displaying the power of 'classes' the spring method now causes particles closest to the point of impact to separate, illustrating that a collision has occurred.

I had to think this though quite a bit. At first I had the particles compressing together, but that looked like made the canvas look like a box that was shrinking. After some research, I released that the particles should look as if they are "pushed apart".

Grid Advanced - Open Processing Link

Grid Moves

Concept

This example applies the moving code from before to the particle class. It's a bit more advanced now, and uses an if statement for the tween. Whatever the speed is divided by (speed determined by dragging distance) is the same value used for frames of animation.

It still has a way to go before it meets my concept, but this provides the foundation.

Grid Moves - Open Processing Link

Grid Realized

Experiment

Even though this is almost certainly going to end up as part of my final design, I though it should go into the experiment category since it is the first time that I have tried to use classes. This creates a grid in a block formation. 

While in it’s current state it does not really do anything new, the particle class is really powerful. Using constructors, fields, and methods I can now control each particle separately. 

Grid - Open Processing Link

Shock wave

Research

This probably fits slightly into the superfluous category that designers often despise. However, since my design is so simple, I think it would add a extra layer of interest.

If I wanted my design to involve explosions, then it seemed appropriate for the effect to have a resulting shock wave. The video I found, from the Myth Busters tv show does a great job of showing how a wave behaves. I would like to try and copy its visual style in my grid.

MythBusters shockwave - Link to video

Eruption

Research

I have been told to spend more time thinking about what exactly I would like my application ‘to do’. To me, this means what effect the impact should cause. Since this should feel like an eruption, I looked for some videos of volcanoes. 

From the video below, I was inspired to create something that ‘glows’ like lava, but ‘spurts’ at impact. I need to think more about how to abstract these features into a simple grid.

National Geographic Volcanoes 101 - Link to Video

Audacity

Experiments

Since this is a sound project, it was time to face the music (pun intended) and think about the sounds I would like to create. The most important, would be the ‘eruption’ sound. I looked around a bit, a quickly found a sound that was appropriate; not to difficult since explosions are pretty generic.

Currently I’m using the free application Audacity to edit the sound. It was easy enough to cut out any unnecessary pauses, now I just need to create explosions that vary in length and volume.

Slam

Concept

This iteration is a proof of concept. It’s meant to symbolise the dragging of the whole canvas. On release it smashes into the edge of the screen depending on how far it is dragged. The next step is to create something similar with particles, so I can visualise the distruction.

Slam - Open Processing link

Earthquake/Volcano

Concept

I think I finally have an idea that is interesting. I wanted to do something based on nature, but still be abstract. In this concept, designed to feel like a volcano or an earthquake, has the user dragging the entire canvas, and, on release, smashing it against the side.  I knew I would need a way of visualising the destruction and as  it is not possible for me to actually create lava with my current level of understanding I am using inspiration from the ToneMatrix and using a grid.

Grid

Research

The following example from Andre Michelle Laboratory is just great. It’s a sinewave synthesiser that is trigger by clicking squares on a grid. The application is simple, and the sound is very effective. It’s also a good example of the ‘Beat Box’ type of sound.

At this point I’m not really interested in making something too similar to this application. On the other hand, I think I may take some inspiration from its ‘look’.

ToneMatrix - Link

Bells

Concept

This last concept contains two lines that cross at the position of the mouse. If the mouse is moved, so are the lines. The canvas itself is covered in bells (possibly randomly placed). ‘Hammers’ of varying sizes can be placed onto the strings. The user can create different sounds by moving the mouse and hitting combinations of bells at once.

I think it could be an interesting idea, but as it is it possess too much control to be interesting. If I choose this design it will require a lot of development  

Buckets

Concept

The idea behind this next concept is that there would be buckets hanging from the top of the screen. By placing the mouse over particular buckets, a stream of shapes would fall from the sky, filling up the buckets. The buckets would then lower depending on weight. If the user clicked on a bucket the contents would drop all at one to the ground. Sounds would vary depending on amount of shapes and the height they fall from, creating distinct sound effects.  

The concept has potential, but I fear it contains too many concrete aspects that would be difficult to apply sounds to.

Heartbeat

Concept

The next three posts contain drawn two dimensional concept storyboards. This one is designed to simulate a heat beat. For this, I was inspired by the previous interaction that show the mouse controlling waves depending on speed and position on the screen. I thought it would be interesting to simulate an electrocardiograph with the mouse controlling ‘life’.  The faster the mouse is moved the faster the heart rate and its subsequent sound. If you were to ‘overload’ the heart by creating too many waves, it would become a flat line. I liked the emotional factor is expressing life and death through sound.

Unfortunately this idea was not well received. Ben thought lacked the abstractness and variability needed to be interesting. In retrospect, I now feel that it is an idea that has already been done to death.

Waves

Research

Yugop.com is a site devoted to six different interactive mouse toys. I like the one pictured below that creates waves from the speed and position of the mouse. With the addition of sound it could be really interesting. I foresee any ideas stemming from this one as fitting into the environmental sound category.

Yugop - Link to Site

Train

Research 

Ben showed us the great example of a music visualiser/video. This video by the chemical brothers somehow manages to match objects passing by a train to beats depending on length, size, position and what must me hundreds of other variables to reflect such a diverse display of sounds. While I would love to create something that sounds and looks as interesting as this, I think it is too risky to try and simulate all the necessary sounds. This example is particularly effective because of its originality, which is also difficult to match.

Multidimensional

Philosophy and Exploration

In the first lecture for sound-shape Ben showed us many examples of sound and form in unity.  I hope to cover some of these and other examples in later blog posts. For now I would like to cover some of the different ways I could approach this project. The ideas that that initially occur to me are a beat box, a music visualiser, a sound visualiser or an interactive piece that reflects real life sounds.

The most obvious to me is to create a beat box. It works great as an interactive toy and there are endless possibilities.  Perhaps gravity could change the sound of an object depending on how high it drops. I also have an idea (expounded upon later) that would involve placing bells on the canvas and objects on ropes colliding to create interesting sounds.

The visualiser, if I could get it to work, would have the advantage of if sounding great, which is much more difficult in the case of the beat box. I think I shall probably avoid this as the level of interactivity would be low.

The final category that comes to mind is an interaction that reflects real life objects.  This involves taking a familiar sound and reflecting it through abstract imagery. While slightly more limiting than the beatbox concept, it could be really interesting to experiment with the emotional aspect of sounds.

The possibilities of the examples above show how much more effective designs can be with the added dimension of sound