New and Improved

The interactive programme has change slightly in intention than my first ideas. Now the sound shape is more of what the wind chimes would sound like if you spin them really fast around a center point. A really cool thing I did with this new version is made it change rotation speeds depending on how far away it is from the center, not from the top left which I learnt how to use from here. I also added sound which I tried to make sound like the shape, I first added sounds I made in GarageBand, but after getting help from a tutor I learnt how to make sounds in processing which was great for me because the sorts of sounds I wanted to make were precisely the sort of sounds processing lets you make. What I have is the best I can do so far.
Possible things to improve on would be aesthetics, sound quality and diversity – or rather making the programme respond to several different things i.e. the mouse’s speed. Other things that could change could be it’s colour and or shape as it moves around. To a certain extent I have tried all of these things, but nothing was to the quality I would expect in a final presentation so they were left out. Click here for a link, I don't think having a sound-shape (as cool as it is) is a good thing to have running on your blog site all the time.

My first interactive sound-shape

Several steps later I have made a sound-shape that interacts as the mouse moves and I have an idea of what the sound should be. I’m thinking of using a wine glass playing sound, a link to the idea is here. The problem I have now is that it interacts with where the mouse is but only from the top left to bottom right, and it’s super sensitive so putting sound to it would be very, very difficult. Also there is this faint imagine left behind where ever the sound-shape has been and I don’t know how to get rid of it, more work I guess.I also add a little bit of code which means that the sound-shape starts in the middle and spinning - I just thought it made the programme slightly more appealing.

I'm not sure why it is slightly to the side in blogger...

Fisrt Attempt; darn translate function

My first attempt at making a sound shape was not very successful as I had not idea how to make the thins rotate around a point and I kept getting an error with the translate() function. I found an existing programme and had a look at how they got there’s to work. I then got the idea to make the sound-shape react, not with the mouse knocking against it but by the mouse moving around – the sound-shape also move with the mouse. How far I got can be seen below.

First Ideas

The best ideas I came up with and showed at the interim were basically an abstract way of showing how an existing sound-shape behaves, in my case, wind chimes. The best fitting the project criteria was a set of slightly awkwardly sized boxes that if interacted with, would react in an interesting and slightly random way, but each time unique. It essentially would have been a programme that would behave in a similar way to a wind chime. I really like this idea but didn’t feel it would be aesthetically pleasing and as I found with my last project, it is important to not get too attached to your ideas. So I came up with a new design that would be a wind chime if all the ends of the strings were attached, and the body or the rest of the wind chime spun around the center. I could then make the wind chime end parts a more literal analogy of the sound they created. My idea is that the will be able to be interacted with, with the mouse which would cause the wind chime ends to knock against each other and then settle back to there normal state.

Inspiring Video

 

This was just a really clever and inspiring video I found, click here for a link to video.