Nick Gang's Pot-Smoking "Sound Cave"

Due dates:

• Milestone 0: Wednesday Oct. 26, 2016
• Milestone 1: Wednesday Nov. 2, 2016
• Final due date: Wednesday Nov. 9, 2016
• Note that your performance on the milestones, and your participation in in-class feedback sessions with your classmates, contributes to your assignment grade.

In this homework, you will make an "artful software" using OpenFrameworks that will:

• be interactive,
• be musical,
• be beautiful,
• involve some kind of audio effect and/or synthesis,
• and reflect a unifying design and aesthetic.

You really should think in terms of artful design for this homework: try to make a coherent system acting as a whole rather than a "purely technical object" just fulfilling the homework's technical requirements. Spend some time thinking about what type of graphics fits the idea you're trying to convey and how they interact with the audio effect and the user input.

This could be a sound visualizer, a musical video game, a purely abstract interactive piece of art, etc. Feel free to add an audio input to your project a base the sound design part of this assignment on some kind of audio effect.

Tips

• DO NOT rely on "standard" user interface elements for this homework such as sliders, knobs, buttons, etc. The interface shouldn't be obvious! Explain in your README file how to interact with your system (e.g. what key on the keyboard controls what, etc.).
• Consider all means of interaction, not just keyboard and mouse.
  • Audio input provides a wealth of information (e.g. volume; spectral centroid, flux, rolloff; onset detection; etc.).
  • Video input is accessible, e.g. in OpenFrameworks using ofxOpenCV. Recall that the Laptop Accordion used this to great effect!
• Often, less is more. If you're not an expert in computer graphics, constrain yourself to a few design elements. You can make an amazing project with just lines and shapes, if it is interactive and expressive.
• Stereo sounds MUUUUCH better than mono.
• You may be using both the input and the output of your computer: be careful with feedback!

Starter/Example Codes

• ofxPlanets.zip, an OpenFrameworks project with simple graphical manipulations.
• ofxWaveformWaterfall.zip, an OpenFrameworks project which plots input audio waveforms in a waterfall, like in sndpeek.
• ofxFaustExample.zip, an OpenFrameworks project which uses a Faust-compiled reverb. Very similar to the previous JUCE starter code
• ofxBokehExample.zip, an OpenFrameworks project which draws "bokeh" textures which are activated by the frequency content of incoming audio. NOTE: requires the ofxFft addon. See here for more info on addons and how to install them.

Resources

• Last year's projects, for inspiration.
• Faust Sound Effects: a collection of common sound effects implemented in Faust
• Faust stereo effect in JUCE demo application
• JUCE 2D visualisation application example (spectrogram and spectroscope)
• SndPeek

Milestone 0

Be preprared to present you overall design and ideas for this homework.

Milestone 1

You should have a working program representing some portion of your final goal.

Final Deliverable

• Making a plug-in is not an option for this homework.
• Package your project and make it available on GitHub (or any other platform you're used to: BitBucket, SourceForge, CCRMA GitLab, etc.).
• Make sure that your code is reasonably well commented.
• Write a quick description/documentation in a README that you will put at the root of the project.
• Make a short demo video and post it on YouTube (or somewhere else).
• Send the link of your project and video to Romain and Tim.