This project uses several samples associated with babies (such as maracas, toy clocks, and baby gibberish), together with one 808 sample to create a repeating sequence of sounds! It also includes a pixel art baby that can crawl around the ground and go to sleep at any point!
Sequencer Google Drive Folder
To use my sequencer, all you have to do is download the drive folder above (I’m so sorry for the lack of organization of my files, but at least, they work!!). If you run the ‘milestone.ck’ file, the sequencer will start to play. You can crawl with your left and right arrows, click on the books or crib bars to create repeating sounds, and click on the ‘ABC’ blocks to play a longer sample once. Also, pressing the spacebar makes the baby cry, and pressing the down arrow makes it sleep. When the baby sleeps, the left samples stop looping.
Wishlist Goo Goo Grapplers today!!!!
This sequencer was inspired by my brother’s upcoming game, Goo Goo Grapplers. The game is also baby themed, and I wanted to explore this playful and childlike wonder that babies have. So, I had the idea of representing what a baby would do if they could play with several sounds. At the same time, babies and sequencers made me think of this very weird fact that many rappers use ‘baby’ in their name (LilBaby, DaBaby, Baby Keem, etc). I never quite understood that, but I thought it could be funny to mix baby sounds with trap/808s to show how this is a bit jarring.
Honestly it was a blast to explore so many systems interacting with each other. My main goal was to have fun with this assignment, and while it was very hard to actually get some more complex ChuGL (such as the sprite animation) things working, it was worth it! Even making my own pixel art was something I had never done before yet wanted to learn. It's not perfect, but I’m very proud of it! Perhaps my main struggles were simply getting my aesthetics and buggy code to work. I’m very glad I started early and had a bit of incremental progress at every point of this deadline!
I am still not very proud of my organization within Chugl/ChucK. I hope that I can make more use of the import system for my next project because right now I have a bunch of repeated code in a single massive file. I wish I had more time to organize myself (or learn how to organize my code as I do it, instead of thinking about it afterwards) because this project was approaching the level of unwieldy disorganization…
Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the great amount of help I received from several people throughout this project: First, when ideating, Kunwoo really helped me lean into the Baby theme! When actually implementing the sequencer together with the sprite animation, I couldn’t have done it without Andrew’s source code and guidance! Finally, I’d also like to thank my brother, who gave me access to his game’s sprites (The ABC blocks). I’d also like to make it clear that some of the debugging issues were solved using Chat GPT’s o1-Preview Model (such as properly initializing my classes, math calculations, and other minor things). Furthermore, almost all my samples came from freesound.org.
I didn’t have much interaction with music sequences before yesterday’s lecture. Perhaps the only experience that I can think of is seeing my brother and my best friend making music with their OP 1’s and OP Z’s. While that was very fun, I also think they were very ‘traditional’ forms of sequencers. I’m very interested in exploring other ways that sequencers can be designed. Yesterday’s lecture showed me several references, such as the AlphaGo synthesizer, Isle of Tunes, bbq, and several of the previous 256 students that really inspired me. With that in mind, I came up with three sketches for sequencers that i’d love to explore:
My second idea is a visualizer made for making baby music. I think that it could be quite wholesome to have traditional baby objects (such as a maraca, or a teddy bear) that make sounds for babies to fall asleep. I imagine that this would take a lot of inspiration of existing baby songs, and maybe the crib itself could show time moving.
This idea came from my own struggle with visualizing how connecting sounds and effects in ChucK work. While this is a bit ambitious, I would love to create a sequencer that plays with the ChucK language itself. In my vision, the user would be able to actually connect several ChucK features (such as LPFs, Envs etc) in a GUI. Then, they could use samples of sounds to make music (and maybe even learn something about chuck?)
My third idea is to have Abbey Road be my sequencer. Idk I was wearing a Beatles shirt today so it inspired me to make this one. Maybe the sounds are samples of Beatles songs. But I was thinking that a person could be walking around the road and as they step on each of the crosswalks, different sounds start playing according to what the player has chosen.