Assignment #2: Audio-Visual Instrument
PROCESS
For this assignment I decided to start with a simple musical “stamping” tool that would change colors and notes with mousePressed. I had the initial thought to make music with particle systems that you could “paint” with or stamp across the screen. I initially had some difficulty getting the first particle system I chose to work with to change colors with keyPressed, instead it would change the colors of all the particle systems that had already been placed. Eventually I found another code that lo and behold worked when I pieced together with the rest of my sketch…still getting the hang of how particle systems work. Below is a visual timeline of my process or code “sketches” for the final sketch:
Video demo of the final version:
Here is the link again to the sketch, where you can also view the code.
REFLECTION
I got pretty much where I was trying to go with this except the sound interaction isn’t quite where I would like to be. I think the overall palette could still be improved and I would like to work on it more in another iteration, possibly using other effects in tone.js in particular to make the single tones repeat or pitch up/down in different ways instead of rerecording new samples.
I also encountered an issue where sometimes I would hear a glitch in the audio especially while playing different sounds at once and am wondering how and if I could prevent that.
I think however this was fun to work on and could be a good jumping off point for other projects. I really enjoyed the examples we played with in class (patapap.com and floradrift), where you can play an instrument and make parts turn on and off and light up different colors, and I would like to try something in that style as well, or possibly a combination of tools with a selection menu to choose your tool (See: KidPix.). Triggering different shapes and audio-reactive visual responses from the shapes would also be nice to experiment with.