AMY E MARTIN // Blog

So for one of my interactive studios (all my posts start off this way, I should think of something different to say, perhaps involving time vampires) we're doing small programs using sound and choice. Our first two projects were to make a soundboard out of a comic and make an instrument. I predictably pulled something from TekkonKinkreet and added some Buddhist chanting. Then I made some virtual bongos. Painfully simple projects as my brain needed a bit of a Processing break. We have four more projects using sound and choice to create for next Thursday and I've started slowly on a couple with ideas for more in the works.

One is an applet that takes words and plays sounds with them. I'm not entirely sure how I want this to work, or, more correctly, I know exactly what I want this to do, I just don't entirely know how to make it work so that it does what I want it to do. I've spent most of the day poking around with code (making sure a sample plays once instead of starting and restarting over and over again, attempting to split apart tracks so that I can make the applet color-sensitive, etc) and I accidentally ended up with a simple Processing music visualizer. It looks something like this:

I can't really use this for class because it doesn't involve any choice (and I think it'd be kind of lame to slap a text field on here and say "you can change the music" and have *that* be the choice aspect) but I think it's a lovely accident. Much thanks to my awesome classmate Bryan Bindloss, who provided the fantastic samples I've been playing with all day.

Labels: interactive, processing, programming, school work