For my final I built upon some of the work I’ve made this semester. I made a randomized sound looper, that changing uses the alphabet and a 10print operation to display whats currently playing.
When you press a key, a 9 second sound file I created will be triggered. In order to keep the sounds together, they do not play until the looper restarts. This is something I will improve on in further versions as it can be time consuming to always wait 9 seconds to hear changes to what is going on.
I built on my LetterToNum class and object definitions to attach letters to music files I imported.
I made all of the sounds in Presonus Studio One, at 107bpm. There are wurlitzer, drum, guitar, jazz organ, and bass tracks.
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.
Ray and I started out with the idea of creating a randomized music creator/visualizer. This would be based in text. We originally wanted it to play a sequence of drum loops/melodies that follow text input from the user. We eventually ended with a random generator that categorizes every letter to a specific drum loop and melody. What you type into the input field, is visualized with the text itself and circles that are connected to the amplitude of the mic input. The drum loop and melody at this point is only based in the first two letters.
For our pixel array project Jan and I were inspired by two pieces of art, the Treachery of Images and John Baldesarri’s “I will not make anymore boring art.” We wanted to recreate the pipe image with text pixels that read “this is not an image.” Once we got that working we decided to decode the image in red. When you type the letters in the words, they reappear in their original pixels.
First we had to load all of the pixels of the original image. We wrote a for loop to go through each pixel and take the color value. We created an array with the letters that are in “this is not an image.” After that, we re-project the letters over the image with a condition. This condition is whether or not each text variable has been typed yet. This is found in the special p5 function keyTyped. We flip each variable every time it is pressed. If it has not been pressed it starts out red. Once it is pressed it displays the original color of the treachery of images.
Below is our keyTyped function and Letter class we created to store the information of each letter pixel.
I cleaned up the game play on my Smash the Pumpkin Halloween midterm game. Now, the array of pumpkins never gets larger than 200. This way the smashed pumpkins are still in rotation. This makes the game harder but also fixes the overloading array issue. Before the game would eventually slow down because the array was being pushed to forever. Now the game runs smoother and is more enjoyable.
I achieved this through two pieces of code. First, I limited the array size seen here.
I also needed to recycle the pumpkins back to the bottom after they reach the top.
Below is the game play for the cleaned up version!
Below is my final source code for the whole project.
Looking back on my first blog post I can say that I have come a long way in solidifying my understanding of basic coding concepts. While I used to do some C# coding in unity a few years back, I figured out that I really needed to reinforce more of the basics than I had expected. This has helped me conceptualize and think about future projects, now having the base understanding. In my first blog post I also expressed a desire to learn more about the internet of things and incorporating more into my code. This was achieved through serial communication and seeing my 10print design changing with a potentiometer. That was an extremely gratifying experience and I hope to only build and bridge my skills and classes more.
The landscape of code is vast, and I believe that there are harmful elements. Although coding itself is not to be blamed. I think back to Ken Perlin’s discussion in our Applications course where he talked about human nature being the cause for how bad systems can be in place. The technology is just a tool and not inherently bad, although unfortunately used in harmful ways. And just like any other tool it can also help me be more creative. I find it is very helpful to bring my artistic sensibilities to different platforms as well. This includes P5 sketches, installations, interactive art, etc. I am excited for the future and all of the projects to come.
This week I set out to make a Halloween themed game. While it still needs a lot of work, I’m happy with my use of classes and am excited to build upon that. It is a very simple smash the pumpkin game, where there is a particle system creating an array of pumpkins. They are randomized and generate from the bottom of the screen upwards. The cursor is turned into a hammer, and when you smash a pumpkin the image updates to a smashed pumpkin. Also once you hit 50 smashed pumpkins, they shrink to half the size. I need to find a way to update my distance function for when the shrinking happens. I was having trouble getting it to update without throwing the program into some kind of infinite loop.
Here are some photos of the game in addition to the main source code.
This week we talked about defining our own functions, and tidying our code. While I slightly changed the look of my project from last week I made a lot of changes within the code to expand on what I was trying to do. I originally set out to make an interesting 10print example using triangles instead of diagonal lines. This week I implemented a for-loop instead of an if statement for the actual 10print horizontal printing functionality. I then wanted to further randomize things with some sort of user input. I thought using an object I call “color” would be a fun way to change things up. That way while it is printing different triangular shapes I used the mousePressed function to change the colors being printing. As I continue to expand on these ideas I will be making it more user interactive and intuitive how to change the shapes and the amount times it runs.
I also added a new argument to my printing functions called “times” which dictates how many times each function will run. This became interesting when I realized that if I call two functions in draw at the same time, the spacing would actually be different because they are being drawn together. This created crazier patterns and is an interesting idea to try and expand on in the future. Below are some examples of the resulting images and new code.
This week I wanted to focus on creating a simple algorithmic design that iterates, and changes over time. I was really inspired by the 10print example. Instead of using diagonal lines I wanted to incorporate more colors, so I used triangles with fill. I loved watching the program move in rows and grow. I also wanted it to keep changing once it hits the bottom. I began experimenting with different colors and transparencies. Below are some examples of the iterations I went through and the final code.
For this week’s project Neta and I attempted to make a breathing exercise. We start on the home screen, where we see a prompt that asks how you are feeling. There are two black circles to choose from. When you hover over either circle another prompt appears. “Are you anxious?” or “Feeling good?” If you choose feeling good, it takes you to our exit function. If you choose, anxious it take you to the breathing exercise. This is what the graphics look like.
We originally wanted the circle to inflate while the cursor is hovering, and then stop itself after four seconds. This is where we ran into some issues. We couldn’t get the circle to stop without ending the If conditional. When we did set it to start deflating, it would get caught in a feedback loop at its maximum size. I think by controlling the circle with different variables it could’ve helped us achieve what we wanted. I think a “for loop” could’ve helped too but it is not something we have figured out yet. We did get a slider on the exercise page to turn the background from yellow to pure white.
We then added a smiley face instead of the cursor on the exit function for aesthetics.
Below is the code for the home screen.
We also built on the game state changing in my last project to change when options are clicked.
I’m very interested in making games so I decided to focus my project on calls to action and level building. I used simple commands like dragging your cursor over an object, to get the user to trigger an action. I then wanted the game to call a new function to do something else. I made levels for this.
Here I built in the four stages of the project.
These are all the variables I definedHere you can see I collected the amount of time the user has been clicking, then triggering the next level.
Will Politan ITP Blog 