Music 256A Homework 2
Elena Stalnaker | Fall 2021
Final Narrative - 10/18/21
Description: A detailed description would spoil the narrative. The narrative also serves as a full demonstration.
Instructions: Can move camera up and down and left and right with arrow keys or WASD. Can move forward and backward using the scroll on the mouse, or by moving the mouse left and right (right being forward) for smoother motion.
Build: Unfortunately, my build doesn't show the spectrograms or waveforms, which might mean there is just no microphone input? I need to get help to figure out how to fix it. I did my recording in play mode. Was trying to build for MacOS.
Thank you so much to Kunwoo for all your help with this project, both with bug fixes and with your suggestion about doing my narrative the reverse of how I planned it for dramatic effect. We are all so grateful to have you as a TA.
Audiovisualizer Brainstorm - 10/7/21
Idea 1: Stormy Sea
White waveform sound as lighting, have different parts drawn from different points so that it crackles down at diff angles but still all one fork. Maybe add a glow effect to the lines? That stays when they fade? Like how lightning blinds you for a bit? Spectrogram history is the ocean, but you view it from the low frequency side and history moves right to left - like how in real life waves are bigger as you get closer to the shore, and spikes are usually bigger closer to the low freq end. A high frequency spike might look like an incoming tsunami. Alternately, could have camera in the middle of the ocean, with spectrogram history going out in multiple directions as you float and look around at the flashing lightning.
Idea 2: Steam Vent
Vent in space, sending steam into the void, with shiny silver spheres representing the spectrogram history in the form of steam, expanding out as they go up until they disappear. Waveform is visible in a different mode, when you press a key and zoom in on the steam spheres, there are rainbow lines crackling between them, and all of those lines are the waveform audio
Idea 3: Trippy Pyramid
Spectrogram history expands in 4 (or more?) walls, narrowing to a point, and each new line of history both on a neighboring wall and slightly raised, so it looks a bit like a spiral. Do something with colors too. Maybe waveform could be somehow represented in the colors of the spectrogram history? But that might be hard to make read. Or, maybe waveforms appear on the edges of the pyramid? with anchor points being at the top and one of the vertices of the base, so as many waveforms as there are walls.
Tutorials - Progress Report - 10/7/21
As of Wednesday, Oct. 6, I finished all 3 tutorials. I felt that the tutorials were extremely helpful and I appreciated their step by step approach. They certainly made Unity a lot more accessible, but it is still a daunting program. I don't even know where to start with coding the spectrogram history. I have no idea how to judge what would be super difficult to create versus simpler to code. I suppose I'll play around with the chunity audio visualizer a bit first, and hopefully get a feel for which of my ideas might be feasible.