"Step" Sequencer

(so renamed during class)

Emily Saletan, Fall 2024

A pair of footsteps follows your mouse as it travels around the scene. The footprints you choose to leave behind sound out via a circular playhead that radiates from the center. Retrace your footsteps and wipe one away to erase the pitch.

ChucK Code

Instructions

Travel: Move your mouse around the screen.

Print: Left click, and the next step will leave a blue print on the screen. The pitch that placement is associated with will also play.

Erase: Travel to the footprint and rub back and forth with your mouse to swivel, wiping the print away.

Play: Bring your mouse back to the center of the scene.

Pause: Move your mouse away from the center.

Reflection

Ideas and inspirations:
My intial inspiration was my experience dancing in participatory environments. I envisioned the player being able to dance on the trackpad using their finger (clicking, swiping, etc.) and see the correlating dance pattern while hearing the correlating real-life recorded sounds. I wanted to try to re-mutualize the footprints as a live extension of the mouse movements to capture the feeling of immediate connection that we feel to our own bodies. However, this proved too difficult given the timeframe! At a certain point, when I had just barely gotten the feet to walk towards the mouse, I "pivoted" to a walking-based step sequencer. A wellness class that I'm currently enrolled in had also recently taught a walking meditation that raised mindfulness about each time we connect to the ground.

Another paradigm shift that occurred was that I realized that my design had moreso been for a live instrument, rather than a editable and playable sequencer. I had a dream of polyphony: the player leaving a history of steps behind and a circular playhead of light ringing out each footprint as it passed. I had already built the swivel function in order to show a more realistic way that we turn on the ball of the foot, so it became a meaningful mechanic in erasing and editing the sequence. I was also able to use the various walking and stomping sounds that I had recorded.

Difficulties and Enjoyments:
One thing for me to work on is choosing my battles! I tended to get caught up on one element, unable to move on. I think one of my strengths in this project was my understanding of the real-life mechanics of stepping movements -- but executing those details accurately took a lot of time. One weakness I have (that will only improve with practice) is that I can often imagine A Way to accomplish something that's nowhere near the easiest or most efficient. Andrew noted that a simpler implementation of pivoting using the ball of the foot would have been to attach the foot as a child of a smaller object that was located at the pivot point I wanted, then rotating the smaller object. Instead, I did a whole lot of translating to the origin, rotating, translating back, and rotating again.

Despite the frustrations of collision detection, rotation, and so on, I feel like I came to understand the math of the visuals a lot more - and I was excited about the dreamed-up design, so it was enjoyable to work toward it. I am happy with how the idea transformed. I am happy with the human-ness. I would like to continue working on it after the quarter is done to smooth out the execution.

System design:

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Kunwoo Kim and Andrew Zhu Aday for providing guidance, support, and encouragement.