Grant Bishko

Music 256a: Reading Response Chapter 3

10/09/2021

The concept of the illusion of motion was fascinating to me. Namely, the idea that “motion is the process of change that gives rise to experience” really made me think about my audio visualizer project for this week and my own skill set in terms of “visual arts”.

I have seen “behind the scenes” of animated movies before where you see how we get the illusion that a character is moving by putting many pictures after each other quickly. In 7th (?) grade, for a school project I made a stop-motion animation -- it was quite challenging because I kept getting impatient and moving my character too much between each picture; this gave my short movie a very clunky and jagged look. But! What if we could make a computer do all of this for us? What if there was a way to call a function for every frame to simulate this illusion of movement? What if that function was called “update()” and allowed us to move 3D objects in a window. Boy do I have the project for you!

Kidding.

I do honestly find it cool that the most basic form of our audio visualizers is essentially a bunch of squares put together moving at a fast rate. How we can put these odd shapes together and move them ever so slightly in a quick time and it looks like a live representation of our audio?? That’s awesome. I think Interpolation is an interesting and useful concept from this chapter that will apply nicely to our projects.

I still don’t quite understand it, but from what I can gather it will help the “movement” much smoother by calculating the distance of change required for each frame. Does our update() function do this for us? Will we be able to directly use this concept with slew in our projects?

Finally, something that stood out to me from this week’s reading was the “strange design loops” (where the medium meets the message). These almost feel recursive → something we are exploring in my SymSys1 class is the idea of finite automata, context-free grammars, and these algorithmic ways to express the English language. We talked about how language can be hierarchical (phrases containing other phrases), and recursive (phrases containing self-similar phrases that go on forever). Wouldn’t it be crazy if I could make my audio visualizer recursive in some way?? I could use fractals and shapes like that to draw sounds. Don’t really think it’s feasible for this week but it’s always cool to think about the limitless possibilities of design → even when it’s recursive in nature!