You can also view the video here.
Boxing Beats. This experience is an immersive, sample-based drum machine synthesizer placed in the environment of a box gym. There are 6 "playable" objects that feature live samples I recorded myself in my local boxing gym.
As the player moves around the gym, if the gloves are positioned within a playable distance from one of the six playable yellow objects, the player can right click or left click to punch the object with the right or left glove respectively. As the gym clock is playing, the punches will snap to grid and loop every 16 slots. The player can consecutively keep adding hits on each object. Once the player hits all 6 objects, they are "warmed up" for their fight, and boom, lights, camera, action! The match is about to get started! Make your way to the ring and...box!
Subtler adjustments for look/feel included the smoothness of the bobble of the player's gloves, and correspondence to BPM. Additionally, the wall bag sound is slightly louder and pitched up to be more present in the beat. I added a locker sound as an extra 6th layer for the user to punch if it occurs to them (Hint: it should - all yellow objects are "playable!"). I also swapped out all of the stock Ali posters and replaced them with Madame Gandhi concert posters.
Ge had suggested ghost gloves remain in place playing the beat once a beat is set. I had considered this in earlier models before the idea had been offered, but I didn't like aesthetically how that looked because I didn't want a ghost opera necessarily. I instead chose to have audio/visual feedback by having the punching bags illuminate yellow on beat, once the beat has been set. Ge also suggested that the human bobbing to the beat feel more rhythmic, boxer-like and intuitive, so I matched the gloves bouncing and head bobbing to the BPM clock of the gym. This can be toggled accordingly.
Build can be found here.
Project files can be found here.
Thank you to my audience on social media for feedback and enthusiasm about how this might integrate nicely as an Oculus product. Thank you to Ge and Kunwoo for the positivity, support and good ideas throughout the experience of building this project. Thank you to Maggie Shahmirzadi at my boxing gym Outlaws in Los Angeles, and to my coach Brandon Krause for giving me private access to his gym during the recording process. Thank you to the class for feedback, and specifically to Max Jardetzky for his ongoing wisdom and knowledge. This has been my hardest class and absolutely the most rewarding. Thank you so much to the 256A family. It feels really special to submit this final project!
For my milestone 2, I was able to achieve the core concept which is essentially a boxing gym drum machine! All yellow objects in the gym environment signify elements that are "playable", and they illuminate red once they have been activated to the main grid. The boxing gym bell timer provides 16 grid slots at 120 BPM, and the player can add beats in real time that snap to the clock. I recorded all the sounds you hear natively in my local gym in Los Angeles over Thanksgiving Break, and mapped them to the objects in the boxing gym environment. The first and third bags correspond to lower frequency percussion sounds like a kick or a tom, but are sampled from me and a teammate punching the heavy bags. The middle bag corresponds more to a snare sound and comes from us punching a mid-size bag. The wall bag featured at the end of the video also is sampled from a real wall bag I punched, and the speed bag provides a percussive overlap in double time. The left punching glove always strikes slightly softer than the right punching bag to add texture to the beats generated and to mimic real boxing where the front hand is the jab and the back hand is the power shot.
For my final, I would like to add a few more playable objects, switch out the Ali posters for Gandhi posters, be able to toggle the "metronome" on and off, add a slider to control BPM tempo, add the ability to add, remove or re-do percussive sounds in the master grid and perhaps smooth out the interaction between the gloves, bags and audio.
For Milestone 2, I went to my local boxing gym in Los Angeles over the Thanksgiving Break and recorded individual live boxing sounds to sample as percussion in my drum machine. My final will essentially be a drum machine that uses boxing sounds in a live environment to create rhythms and beats on a grid.
The idea behind my drum machine/ synthesizer is to create a percussion composition tool that makes beats using various sounds experienced at a boxing gym. Inspired by the live physical in-person Installation I created at a museum pop-up in 2017 in Downtown LA in collaboration with artist Jen Mussari (see photo below), the idea is to have the player or user engage with different objects in a boxing gym to trigger sound. Experienced from a first person perspective, the camera view is the viewer's view, and you can click L or R in order to punch the object in front of you with the left or right glove on your hand.
Examples of this would be engaging with:
Using these ~10 sounds tethered to a flexible time grid, the user can create a beat composition of various kinds, rhythms, speeds and sounds as they virtually move around the boxing gym like a game. I am working on ensuring that this is a synthesizer that is comprised of samples, with some flexibility to manipulate the sound and compose a robust piece of music.
I have plans to record each of the 10+ sounds above natively in my home boxing gym in LA to then load into the "beat boxing" drum machine to be playable. The idea would be for these sounds to represent common sounds found in a drum/percussion kit like: kick, snare, hi-hat, toms, crash, clap, bell, clave, slap tone etc
A reference for the first person boxing experience is similar to Wii Sports Boxing.
I'd like to get some feedback if additional fighters or a single fighter on the inside of the ring is necessary to add to this experience. Would those people be moving on their own before the player interacts? Would they / it be inanimate until the player steps into the ring to engage? Is having additional fighters in the ring even necessary? I also plan to add higher levels of customization to the gym and its equipment.
1. "Year of the Snake." I grew up loving snakes and I grew up loving Ms. Pacman. So why not design my own game where the user is the snake eating food through a maze environment, but each food item makes a different sound. Building on the sequencer concept, this would differ in that it is a game and there are levels. Also perhaps the music created is cumulative and goes with you to each level to be built upon further.
2. "Music at the Gym." I always find myself at the boxing gym feeling very critical of the unchecked misogynist music that often gets played...so why not create our own music for the gym? Boxing gyms are very percussive and noisy - between the speed bag, various sized punching bags, sparring sessions and time buzzer, there are are lots of ways to reimagine a boxing symphony that is musical. Either as a game or as simply an immersive experience, the viewer moves around the space and triggers different objects or movements to generate the components of a unique musical composition.
3. "Bus Driver Radio." The third idea I have would be to use a yellow school bus or yellow Indian auto rickshaw as the centerpiece for musical sound generation as we drive through an environment. Inspired by my bus driver Harrison who, when I was in Kindergarten, in front of the parents would play the classical music radio station, but then as soon as we'd drive away, change it back to the hip-hop station, this school bus or autorickshaw would generate music based on the different buildings or objects it passed in the street. The user would drive the bus through the city, creating a unique composition every time based on the route.
