"ChucK Chakras" by Kiran Gandhi (YouTube Link)
In my final iteration of "ChucK Chakras" I implemented more of my original ideas and also went ahead and took quite a bit of feedback from the class. Firstly, I wanted the sequencer portion to read as a yoga mat, so I added a purple yoga mat underlay below the sequencer slots. I also want to note that each sequencer slot is a sacred geometry shape of the "seed of life" into which you drag and drop each chakra. I liked the idea of planting a seed thematically for this project. In order for the touch/feel to be more satisfying, I also added the ability to hear the sound you are selecting as you click a chakra to drag it on to the yoga mat. Next, I wanted to make sure I gave the user a toggle button for the tempo. In order to build the button, I knew I wanted it to make contextual sense in this environment, so I chose an amethyst crystal with a pointed shape to represent the selector tool for the BPM options. 10pm on the amethyst dial is 60BPM, 12am is 80BPM and 2pm is 120BPM. If you turn the crystal all the way pointing down to 6pm, the speed ramps up to 240BPM.
Two main pieces of feedback I got from the class were having more sound options and having more audio-visual feedback. So to address the first point, I added the right knob, a citrine pointed crystal, that allows the user to select three different patches: crystal bowls, percussion or drones, where the 7 chakras correspond to a set of 7 sounds in each preset. If you point the crystal all the way down to 6pm, you get all three sounds stacked together! The three function as percussion, bass and synth together and sound pretty. The bass or "drone" sound is a sine wave + a modified blowbottle from ChucK with the noise turned town. When I was programming the drone sound, I was getting a lot of distortion when more than one chakra was placed in a stack. I had to experiment with volume and pick the volume that would allow for four chakras to be stacked with no distortion. This created some leveling issues between the three sounds, but when the three were played together I thought they actually blended really nicely and the mix levels made sense. The percussion preset consists of 7 sounds I designed by field recording audio from nature and manipulating them into a kick, 2 toms, a hi-hat, snare, clap and bell. The sounds therefore are all "organically sourced" which only further adds to the sonic experience of the meditation sequencer.
To address the second main piece of feedback I got, i.e. to create some kind of audio-visual response in the sequencer world as the playhead moves through each of the selected chakras, I experimented with a few ways of showing this. The best way I determined was to have the meditator be illuminated by the light of the corresponding chakra! When I was able to get this working, it ended up looking really sick and it was an aha moment. The meditator was locked at red for a while before I was able to assign color hues to each chakra and have it move through the colors according to the selected chakra. I wanted to consider having shades of color where multiple chakras were selected but that did not look as pretty as committing to the 7 main colors. So when there are multiple chakras being played at once, the sequencer chooses a random color from that group to illuminate the meditator. I also decided to start the meditator in darkness until the music starts.
Amethyst Crystal Knob: Adjust BPM
Citrine Crystal Knob: Adjust Sound Preset
Start/Pause Meditation: Start/Stop Sequencer Playhead
Just like when I am producing music, a lot of time goes into a project like this and it is crazy to look up the clock and not know where the last few hours went. Google is definitely your friend for compiler errors, and also puzzle piecing ways of making different components work together. For this particular project, I found that having a clearer design sense before building actually helped a lot, because the way I worked was fairly modular where I would implement one feature at a time. The only major change from an original design idea was that the crystal knob was originally going to be much smaller but it didn't really read. So then I remembered some of my favorite plug-ins when producing music and how big buttons are always personally the most satisfying and inviting of play. So I decided to make the crystal knobs huge so that they intuitively suggested to the user that they are parameters that can be played with. One funny moment was when I was trying to get the crystals to correspond to certain parameters, they just started endlessly spinning - I almost kept it as an aesthetic option because they just looked like crystal DJ turntables while the meditation music played and it kind of awesome. Example below.
Build can be found here.
Project files can be found here.
Thank you to our class for feedback, my audience on social media for genuinely wanting to buy this app and to my classmate Max Jardetzky for his support.
I am experimenting with two names for my project - either "ChucK Chakras" or "The ChucKra Opera" (which was originally "The Chakra Opera"). My sequencer is based on my affinity for yoga, wellness, music and meditation. The stone meditator is depicted against a dynamic cosmic rainbow background, and the user selects a Chakra from the stone meditator. They then drop a Chakra of their choice onto an empty slot in the sequencer grid below. The root Chakra corresponds to a low C, and then moving up the scale in C Major, the crown Chakra at the top corresponds to a high note B. I chose to have 4 tracks so that the user can create harmonies (5th chords, 7th chords etc) within the grid. Once the user clicks "play me", the playhead begins moving through the 8 bars, playing the sequence the user has created. The sequencer remains on loop and can be changed in real time until the user clicks "pause me" (I programmed one button that changes functionality from "play me" to "pause me" because it looked cleaner on the statue). The sequencer intentionally is at a slow BPM to provide a more yogic/ meditative experience, but I would like to build an interactive tempo button for my final submission, because when I experimented with extremely quick tempos it also sounded really cool. I'd also like to experiment with having the grid read as a yoga mat.
The sound design I used in ChucK is a combination of a rhodes ("rhodey") and a vibrophone mallet, which gave kind of a meditative gong timbre that I was going for for this particular sequencer. The original programming had more dynamism in the code (random timbres and delays generated), but I felt that was confusing when the user actually played back their own sequence. For the final project, I might experiment with bringing back some of these elements in a more mild capacity.
1. My favorite sequencer is the Teenage Engineering OP-Z. It is a synthesizer as well as a sequencer. I love how intuitive it is, colorful, simple and slick. There are a lot of hidden features that enable a low-level entry point to get started and make a beat easily, with a steep learning curve to create subtlety later.
2. Another sequencer that I love and use often in my own production is the Roland tr-08, which is a physical remodel of the original Roland 808. It is a drum machine with pre-loaded sounds that have some parameters for shaping and sculpting each sound, and the user can place sounds of their choosing onto a step-sequencer grid in time. This is a very typical and straight forward example of a classic sequencer, but it is definitely what comes to mind when I envision what a music sequencer is and does.
3. A digital sequencer that I also use is the Beatmaker app by Splice. It is a virtual instrument that allows the user to place beats in time, and visually edit the shape and ADSR envelope of the sound itself over time. I have pre-loaded nature sounds that I field recorded into the sequencer, and then used the app to build my own pre-loaded beats that Splice users now can use on their own. You can check out more here: Madame Gandhi x Splice Beatmaker
1. The first idea I have for my sequencer is related to "energy centers" or "chakras" which are part of ancient Indian healing culture. Each energy center is related to a certain source of spiritual power within the body, and each center is known to correspond to a certain note frequency range. For example, the bottommost energy center, the "root chakra", is symbolized by the color red and the note C. The topmost energy center, the "crown chakra", is symbolized by the color violet and the note B. In between, the energy centers move up in order of the colors of the rainbow, and in order of the Western C Major scale. To that end, I'd love to either have a group of 7 people each representing the 7 chakras or 7 notes, and the user can sequence their singing or sound production as part of the sequencer, to create a "Chakra Opera." Alternatively, I could just have one person in a meditative position, with the chakras illuminated as their corresponding notes are triggered as decided by the user.
2. The second idea I had was related to my passion for percussion. It would be a play on the traditional concept of a "drum circle", where each drum would be visualized in a circle, that the user would be looking at either head on or from the top down. Time might continue onward as we saw in the 2001 video game example in class, so that the user would be quantized to play percussion on time, and the user could choose to add different percussive elements to the beat over time by clicking on the visual representation of them.
3. The third idea I had would be continuing my love for nature imagery. I would design a continuous walk for the user, placed in a forest environment, and I would create a ChucK narrative with previously loaded in nature sounds that I have sampled - twigs, bark, mushrooms, water, pebbles etc - that the user could be interacting with on the "walk" and adding to the sequenced sound scape over time.
