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Homework 3

Weather Band

Weather Band is a music sequencer consisting of three types of sounds, with rain representing dripping water, stone storm representing percussion, and snow representing chime. Each timbre contains several sound effects or pitches to play with. There are separate edit mode and play mode, where the sequence is only viewable and editable in the edit mode, and the weather particles, together with the umbrella animation, belong to the play mode.

Instructions

Production Build

Windows: Download

Unity Project

Download

Reflection

This music sequencer is made to enable the collaboration between natural sounds and artificial sounds. The middle section was originally thunder, yet after researching on weather effects, I feel like stone storm is more intuitive to induce percussive sounds and fits the visuals better. I hesitated about whether to merge the edit and play mode or not, and decided to still split them so as to optimize the sum of usability and aesthetics. Overall, I did not imagine that the hardest part would be to record the demo. To integrate the process of editing the sequence into my narrative, I have to finish each addition within 16 beats and switch the mode every 16 beats. It really challenged my typing and reaction speed.

Acknowledgements

Milestone 2

Based on my first idea, I used three weather to represent different kinds of sounds, but instead of realistic metal products, I changed to low poly vegetation which visually fits the low poly cloud model better and offers more possibilities to all weather. I spent most of my time searching, recording, and testing sampled sounds for each weather and decided to keep applying dripping sounds to rain, percussion to thunder, yet snow is now coupled to chime. Also, the edit and play view will be split and the play view is designed to show some interesting visual effects with the actual sequence hiding behind. The rain, thunder, and snow effects, together with the play view, are still under construction.

Milestone 1

Sequencer Research: Most of the online music sequencers, including Online Sequencer, consist of grids, where time progresses horizontally and parallel tracks align vertically. This kind of visual representation reads well and is easy to learn. There are also other forms of sequencers, such as Martin Wecke 108 and Groove Pizza, where time is looped in a circle. Audiotool, on the basis of grids, adds a playground where users can operate and actually connect synthesizers and effects.

Chicken Sequencer: Though it takes some time to understand what each chunk of copied code is doing, the coordination between ChucK and Unity is quite clear. While ChucK controls the music timing and communicates the corresponding visual parameters to Unity, Unity, on the other hand, captures the user inputs and broadcasts the changes back to ChucK. This tutorial also touches on how to execute events that have various timing parallelly with the help of spork in ChucK.

Ideas: