Le Wei – Final Project Final Update
I had a hard time coming up with a concrete concept for my project, so what I have so far is a bit of a hodge-podge of little exercises I did. I wanted to achieve the effect of finger painting with sound, with different paints representing different sounds. However, I’m having a really hard time using the maximilian library to make sounds that actually sound good and mix well together. So as a proof to myself that some reasonable music can be made, I implemented a little keyboard thing and stuck it in as well. I think the project would be immensely better to use with the wireless trackpad, since it’s bigger and you can hold it in your hand, but I haven’t gotten it to work with my program on my computer (although it might on another computer w/o a trackpad).
So what I did get done was this:
- Multi touch, so different sounds can play at the same time. But the finger tracker is kind of imperfect.
- Picking up different sounds by dipping your finger in a paint bucket.
- One octave keyboard
And what I desperately need to get done for Thursday:
- Nicer sounds
- Nicer looks
- Getting the magic trackpad working
- A paper(?) overlay on the trackpad so that its easier to see where to touch.
Special Thanks
Nisha Kurani
Ben Gotow
Comments from the Crit 4/25:
iPad?
Kids will love this!
^+1
The colors need work. Consider using a ‘natural’ palette
Do ofSetFullscreen(), then hide the cursor (glutSetCursor or ofSetCursor())
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_Nz9B1XFio)
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Make the paint splotches work on the piano!
Maybe you should have physical buttons (stickers) on the ride side of the touchpad so that you don't have to feel around to change the settings. < -- Agreed. I think you can get rid of the cursor... Lemme google: ofHideCursor() - http://www.openframeworks.cc/documentation?detail=ofAppRunner#ofHideCursor
The keyboard sounds good! The easiest way to get everything harmonioius is to constrain the sounds made by the trails to a certain key or octave.Especially if each note corresponds to a part of a chord and you can push them up and down octaves as necessary. But yeah, if you play the piano, you know. Like restrict to D diminished or C major or whatever you like.
http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix?GBYPASS=3E687A285E324257BD80950DA51AA02C1239938739
http://lab.andre-michelle.com/pulsate
(these are two awesome sound toys and he has some extensive documentation on how to make your generative music not sound painful)
OMG YOU IMPLEMENTED EVERYTHING. Even the trails fade. God le. I think they should fade faster.
I love this!! Reminds me of electroplankton in a wonderful way. This is really nicely fully functioned. The accessibility of this is really nice, the more harmonious you can make things the better. The key to making this work is letting someone with no musical skill come up and be able to make something that sounds good yet unique from the person before them – keep everything in the same key, and add more range for some instruments? Add the ability to loop and replay trails?
Cute.
whats with the steel paint can textured stroke on the buttons? thats a bit visually confusing with the more modern abstract gfx that have no stroke or respresentational reference
Attaching different sounds to different colors was a good idea. It looks each color gets its own paintbrush shape as well, which is also a good idea but would probably look better if it was smoothed out a bit. The keyboard at the bottom seems unnecessary to me, even distracting.
Nice interaction, and unexpected (in a good way) to put it on a magic trackpad. Usually people expect this sort of thing on an iPhone/iPad. Maybe you could look to existing iOS music apps for inspiration.
The audio synthesis could be improved. It’s very theremin-y right now. Check out Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers’s “Bloom” for some ideas about how to make more interesting sounds:
http://www.generativemusic.com/
&
zach gage synth pond – made with OF
I think I was confused about the keyboard. It felt disconnected from the rest of the interface visually and even how you interact with the top half vs the bottom half.
As an option — Consider having a quantized pitch mode, in which you’re able to get actual diatonic semitones (instead of continuously variable pitch). To get diatonic semitones (the notes of a scale, each higher semitone is the twelfth-root-of-two times the frequency of the pitch below. That is,
FreqHigher = FreqLower * powf(2, 1.0/12.0); // approximately 1.059