Music 256a Final Project

"Hall of Unattainable Worlds"

Grant Bishko

My final project "Hall of Unattainable Worlds" is a sound experience. The user wanders freely through a hall of floating "worlds" that each radiate different sounds. The sound museum is made up of poems, nature sounds, quotes, and music, and each world is spatialized around you. This provides the user with a 3D sound experience, so they may enjoy this new world on both an audio and visual level.

Below you will find screenshots of the project, a video clip demo, unity files, and instructions for "Hall of Unattainable Worlds". Enjoy!

Instructions: use either the arrow keys or the 'a', 's', 'w', and 'd' keys to move freely around the space. Use the mouse to click the floating cubes to make them disappear. Once you have collected all but one of the "worlds," the walls fall down to reveal a beautiful sky.

Production build: MacOs

This final project was very difficult for me. Once I came up with the idea, it was actually creatively difficult to come up with the sounds I wanted for each world. The nature sounds (ocean/rain) were pretty simple, but I wanted voices. I wanted meaningful words. Finding those texts were rough, until my mother recommended snippets from a book she loved. I then thought of poetry and found a poem to read. I even got my friend from France to read one of her favorite poems. Once I collected all the sounds, the project came together. It was easier to envision how I wanted the worlds to float, how I wanted the halloway to look, etc. However, something was missing: music. So, I decided to bring back one of my own compositions from many years ago (junior year of high school) and decided that this piece should be included in the project. Not sure if it reads this way, but to me, it kind of represents how far I have come in the past four years. It kind of reminds me of the journey I am on both musically and technically.

Acknowledgements: Ge Wang, Kunwoo Kim, the Fall 2021 Music 256a class, my friends: Dani, Natalie, and Adhara.

Link to previous milestones for this project: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~gbishko/256a/final/index.html

Grant Bishko - gbishko@stanford.edu - 12/09/2021