Alanna Sun

October 20, 2021

CS 476A, Stanford University

Final Audiovisualizer Submission: Lover’s Quarrel

Watch some birds have an argument that escalates into space.

Visualizer Narrative

Visualizer Demo

Instructions

s= scene change starts

c = cancel scene change to stay on current scene

n = narrative/play chuck audio

r = return to mic input

Right click mouse to change camera angle, use arrows to move camera around

Production Build: MacOs

After a very long journey, we’ve finally come to the end of the audiovisualizer project. For my project, I wanted to convey a sense of whimsicality with the idea of birds arguing with each other through the spectrum while standing on a telephone line that’s the waveform. After arguing all night and into dawn, they suddenly find themselves in another galaxy, where their argument has exploded into an infinite space, and there are other birds waiting for them on the other side. The main idea that I wanted to express is that we often get caught up in the heat of the moment during an argument, and it might feel like the end of the world, but then, when we zoom out, we realize that it’s really quite silly, and that on the flip side, arguments are also a byproduct of caring about someone.

It’s been a huge learning curve for me, being my first time using Unity or Chuck, and there were definitely some difficulties encountered throughout. It took me many many tries to get the spectrum history down, and I definitely still wish it looked smoother. I also had some problems with scene transitions and keeping the chuck audio playing through scene transitions. Overall, though, I’m happy with the way this turned out, given the time constraint and a surprise injury that happened last week, but if I do get a chance in the future, I’d like to come back and make some things smoother.

I used the following assets from the Unity Asset Store:

Customizable Skybox for my different scenes, Acorn Bringer Assets for the birds, StarNestSkybox for my final scene.

For my Chuck program, I watched a couple of tutorials from Clint Hoagland and used the chirp sound from the examples in Chuck.

Most of all, big huge shoutout to Kunwoo for all his help throughout this project, from office hours to Discord--could not have done it without him!

Homework #2: Milestone 1

Tutorials

This Unity tutorial was actually pretty fun! I’ve never used Unity before, so all of this is new to me, but I thought the steps were easy to follow and made sense. Although the individual videos were a bit tedious, the tutorial definitely did a good job of familiarizing me with the basics. I had a lot of fun with making the objects spin and creating materials for each type of game object. I will say, though, the buttons on Unity are tiny. My eyes are getting blurry from the inspector…

I found the integration with Chuck to be quite intuitive and liked how you could apply audio and spatialization so easily. It was cool getting to play our own audio files as well! Being able to adjust the volume according to impact velocity went really well with the context of the game.

I had so much fun with the audio visualizer tutorial--getting to play around with the scale, positions, and colors. It was awesome to make something so interactive, especially when the coding process itself was very playful.

Brainstorm

A couple of ideas that I have right now:

1. Inspired by the Dark Side of the Moon Album cover (see below for reference), I’m thinking of having the triangle represent the waveform, and the initial ray of light coming from the left the spectrum, and the rays coming out of the right side colors corresponding to the pitches. When a certain threshold of different pitches is reached, the beams of light will start moving around and coloring in the screen.
   
   
2. Another idea I had was a pot of water boiling over a fire, which represents the waveform. The water line in the pot would be the spectrum. As there are more sounds, the fire glows brighter, until the water reaches boiling point, and everything starts spilling out of the pot. Finally, when all the water is gone, we are left with a pot of dumplings. Although that might be a bit ambitious

Progress Update

I've actually pivoted ideas and am now attempting to create a visualizer in the form of a book. I want to represent the waveform as new lines being written in the book, and the spectrum as the borders of the book. When the book is filled with new sound, it will flip to the next page and continue writing itself. So far, I've been trying to get the spectrum to show up on the borders of the book, but haven't succeeded yet. I’m experimenting with different numbers to get the proper audio response, and am trying to add some curvature to the top and bottom borders. I’m also having some trouble getting the spectrum recorded on the page, and the new audio written in a new line.