Music 256a HW2, Fall 2021
Ray Gifford


Final Visualizer:Walk in the Woods

This audio visualizer, operates like a ~2.5D platformer, where the main character can be moved left and right using the arrow keys. A microphone audio input drives the visuals using Chunity. The rain consists of a particle simulator array spaced out of spectral bins. The probability of rain fall is mapped to energy at each respective bin. As the rain falls, the spectral history is shown, with "now" being slightly above the tree-line.

Visualizer in Action
I used free assets from the asset store (RPGPP_LT) for a tree, that was duplicated, changed in scale, and rotated to make the forest. The grass and path were also free assets from this group. I used the HDRP rendering pipeline, Density Volumes for local fogs. I used temporal reproduction post-processing and anti-aliasing post-processing. The characters and animations were sourced from Mixamo.

Narrative:

This narrative video, shows a boy walking through the woods. It was important to me to use characters in silent story building, to create a sense of scale for forest... that I wanted to feel overwhelmingly large. He comes across someone who is seemingly being consumed by angry fireflies, as he swats them, and runs from them. After the stranger in the woods is killed by the flies, the seemingly angry fireflies begin to hunt down the main character. You can choose to run from the flies, like the stranger in the woods; however, if you go willingly, the flies, instead of killing you, take you to a specific place... where you can see the spectrum and waveform well. The sounds, implemented in Chuck, change from eerie to pleasant to hopefully evoke mixed emotions.

I wanted the narrative to be analogous to something that I learned while taking up surfing, and something that I hope to learn to apply to my own anxiousness. Which is that better outcomes result from not fighting off nature, but rather somewhat going with the flow of it. In this case, the stranger may have been consumed by something that he was unwilling to accept and move forward with. Seeing this unfold may cause the user to misrepresent the intentions of the fireflies. Maybe the fireflies just want to show you something, rather than attack you. This is similar to the justification I have for my anxiety. Otherwise it just seems like an annoyingly out-of-place vestigial mechanism, that presents itself in non-life-threatening modern settings.

The design was inspired by one of my favorite game makers: Playdead. Their free assets for light temporal reprojection and anti-aliasing led me to look into HDRP post-processing options, and density volumes. Thanks to Kunwoo for Unity tips and tricks!
Narrative Video

Screen Shot: