Jasmine Jones
MUSIC 256A, Homework #3
DarkLight
Description:
The DarkLight app, built in Unity/ChucK, is a sequencer with a user-friendly interface. With over 12 sounds to choose from, and 6 sounds to customize, you can explore making different songs for hours. The app allows the user to adjust the tempo, pitch, and loudness of all the sounds, as well as providing a circular grid that snaps each sound to a consistent time (BPM). The possibilities of all the creations you can make is what makes DarkLight so much fun.
How To Use:
To hear a sound, simply click one of the colored shapes on the screen, and it will play in a loop when an adjustable amount of time has passed. There are two, six instrument grids that play simultaneously; in order to switch between the two grids, you can either press 'A' or 'D' on your keyboard. To change the volume of an instrument, left click the silver, center ball on either grid until the instrument (color) you're interested in is highlights. Then use the up and down arrow keys to adjust how loud or soft the sound is. To adjust the tempo of the sequencer, simply click and drag the slider to a tempo you like. To change the pitch of the instruments on the square grid, just right click and of the colored cube shapes. The pitch goes up every time you click, and once the max pitch is reached the pitch wraps around to a very low pitch.
Acknowledgements:
The ChucK + Unity integration would not have been possible without the Chickencer Tutorial from YouTube, which is the basis of my code that produces sounds and communicates information about sounds between Unity and ChucK
Build: For MacOS. Click here to download.
Reflection:
Although this wasn't my favorite piece of work design-wise, I was really proud to have a lot of functionality going for this final version. There's a lot of things that went into this project that aren't super visible or seem quite simple, but it was actually a lot of hard work! It was such a great feeling to get some of the ideas in my head running in the program, even if it was after a lot of frustration and debugging. I still had quite a few ideas I wanted to implement, but I ran out of time unfortunately. Despite that, I still think this project was quite fun, and I love how I got to express the kind of music I like to create/listen to in my final demo/performance :)
Jasmine Jones
1 November 2021
MUSIC 256A
HW #3: Milestone 2
For Milestone 2, I suppose I have something working :( I'm not super satisfied with how the design came out, which is frustrating because it was a huge time sink for me. I spent a lot of time experimenting with concepts for the sequencer, both abstract/minimalist and ones with more cohesive aesthetics but nothing really stuck with me. I found myself in a position where I just needed to make sure I had a sequencer to present, so I have a very minimalist sequencer right now. I'm hoping to find feedback or inspiration so that I can build a much more satisfying aesthetic/design!
Here's the link to my demo for the milestone: https://youtu.be/6b-RTEG8gkw
Jasmine Jones
25 October 2021
MUSIC 256A
Homework #3: Milestone 0
As we are now starting to Sequencer project, we had the task of completing the Chickenser as well as researching some existing sequencers and brainstorming some designs for our own projects.
The Chickenser was pretty smooth to complete as a tutorial. I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of Unity now, so it doesn't feel like I'm just following whatever is typed and clicked during the tutorial, but rather I'm following the ideas of what we need to do in Unity in order to achieve the outcome we want. ChucK still doesn't make the most sense to me, and I feel like I'm still kind of just typing along as opposed to following the ideas thoroughly, but I'm hoping that with more experience with the language I'll be able to navigate it better and open up the possibilities for my projects.
To research different sequencers, I rewatched the student videos from the past couple years as well as looked up some sequencers I knew about. My first instinct was to search for "Beatlab" a visualizer I used growing up that jumpstarted my interest in producing music. Unfortunately, the site is now shut down, but I remember it being your standard grid with loaded sounds, where you toggle each sound at a certain beat, and it was played on a loop. Next I looked into the popular game, Incredibox. This sequencer allows you to put clothes on an avatar in order to make certain sounds in your loop. Although the sounds are at a very high level (no low level of choosing notes and whatnot to my knowledge), it's very fun to play around with and the music made is so satisfying! Lastly, I looked into real-time sequencers in loop stations/pedals used for live music. It's so easy to get super creative with these and I had fun watching loop station "battles", and artists using loop pedals to create a variety of sounds. The TikTok account @eli.koskoff had some of my favorite loop pedal music, with just a guitar!
I have put some images of my initial ideas and sketches below. I'm not leaning towards any in particular, so these are just what I was thinking at the time!
