ICM Final Project Proposal

For my ICM Final I plan on making a unique experience to create music using user input. This will be done in two ways. First through a line input by the user. I will be building upon some of the work I have made for ICM using a lettertonum class that holds the value of user input and can attach other values. This is how I assigned music to text in my last project with Ray. I was also very interested in the 10print examples and I love seeing the array work across the screen. I will fill the screen with the user’s text input and create a visualizer that is displayed through the color of the letters.

I was inspired by Dan Shiffman’s coding challenge #76 of the 10print challenge.

I really wanted to incorporate a random element into my design. I like this example by Mimi Yin of a randomized text generator. I will be using music as my random element, and I put all of the melodies and beats in the same key so that they are essentially in the same language. This allows the random element to be pleasing and make the viewer want to engage with the experience as they get something different each time.

This is an example of how text used as pixels will work. There are a lot of interesting projects that have used this method. I will make a visualizer that changes colors based on the amplitude of the sound files that will be playing. All of the sound files will be in an array and the array location will be referenced in each object of my lettertonum class.

The chrome music lab is a big inspiration for making something fun and interactive using music & visualizers.

For the music style I am largely influenced by Sarah the Instrumentalist. She makes incredible low-fi beats with great drum tracks. I will include a lot of jazzy melodies and drum loops that fit a similar genre.

In terms of project title I want it to represent the idea in a concise way. I am thinking: pick & play or letter beat randomizer.

My one sentence description: Create a beat using text and watch your song come to life.

This project is for anyone without musical experience to have a fun time and explore the different combinations embedded in the code. The things I am unsure about are how fast to make the 10print screening and how to make it more clear exactly whats happening without a long description in front.