FINAL PROJECT: SPACE IS THE PLACE

This project is conceived as an audiovisual 'place to be'. The interaction is shaped by simply existing, moving around, bumping into things, changing direction of viewpoint, etc. Slowly, the user realizes that the environment is soundscape to be actively shaped by their presence. By moving, they can 'compose' the sounds– fade things in and out, pitch-warp, and collide with things. It is woefully incomplete, but hopefully enough of a suggestion of the idea.

Working with Unity, I encountered several obstacles that hindered my progress. One major challenge was object generation; I struggled to find a way to generate objects that made sense within the context of my project. Additionally, using free assets proved frustrating, as they consistently rendered as purple instead of their intended colors. Animating the assets to create a realistic effect, such as trees swaying in the wind, also proved challenging. I wanted to add birds and fish with flocking patterns and accompanying sounds, but I didn't quite have time to implement animating components, so the glowing orbs had to do. The glowing orbs then made me want to reconfigure the entire principle of the landscape, and make it a dreamy, floating lantern scene in a cave or something similar. Despite these obstacles, I was able to overcome some of the challenges and create an endless, generative, and animated terrain, as well as the desired glow ball with particles. However, the limitations of time and my lack of expertise in scripting in the Unity platform, as well as a changing final vision based on my abilities, proved a bit frustratingn in this project. Overall, my project shows less progress than I would like between the last milestone and the final project, largely due to the many dead ends pursued. I still think this is something, though.

FINAL PROJECT MILESTONE 2

haven't quite had time this week to get the mechanics working, but I've been learning about generative mesh landscapes, so that is what I have to present so far!

FINAL PROJECT MILESTONE 1

Inspiration:

I like the world building capabilities of Unity and feel like I haven't had the chance to explore them as much as I'd like to yet. So I'm hoping to do something with terrain, lots of assets, and navigability for the final. As the complexity on the Unity side increases, I'm expecting the sonic complexity to decrease a bit – but I'm curious how my interest in spatial sound translates to the virtual dimension. So I'm hoping to play with static & dynamic spatial elements in a world that you can navigate from a first-person perspective. I imagine it like a sound installation – a world you build, and then can explore any which way, without beginning, middle, or end, without specified ways to use it, etc.

Potential inspiration can be found here:

https://emkasad.com/digital

Initial Notes:

FINAL IDEAS:

a space to exist .. relatively static.. spatialize the sound – a deteriorating point cloud city, a forest, endlessly generatable, with little pulsing orbs of sound – occasional flocks of little shapes / creatures.. etc.. droning mountains… etc. – navigate with arrow keys –
a synthesizer like ableton ‘ learn synths’ that exists in 3 dimensions and grows and changes as you interact with it – e.g. starts as a plane, turns to a circle, controls velocity, pitch, timbre, rhythm, etc.
graphical score realizer – you draw shapes, and they’re realized, quantized in pentatonic scale lol or something – ‘draw’ sound digitally

FOR IDEA 1:

first create the algorithmic simple endlessly generating landscape + the sonic orbs + the flocks – sparse, digital, navigating controls

then start populating with pointlcouds and free available 3d objects