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