Welcome to my 256a hw2 website!

Here begins my long and potentially fraught journey through the wacky world of Chunity.

Current Progress

To date, I'm pleased with my progress in learning Unity/Chunity! I was able to succesfully complete all assigned tutorials, and I had a pretty fun time while doing it. Who knew that coding a rolling ball could be so satisying?

I'm still dusting off my underused ChucK skills, and I have very little experience with C#, but the tutorials provided an informative entry point. I expect that I'll be able to keep up with the course materials, and I'm looking forward to delving deeper into Unity tutorials to broaden my options. The Unity user interface presented no significant issues, and I found it easy and intuitive to use after learning some fundamentals.

Sound Visualizer Brainstorming

My current favorite idea is to create a visualizer that allows a viewer/player to interact directly with the spectrum. For instance, one bad idea which Ge and I discussed is creating a indoor trampoline park which represents audio input through the trampoline surface. Perhaps small controllable characters would be propelled upwards by these changes in surface elevation. Who knows, could be a fun idea, although I'm unsure if I'll have the Unity facility to implement this.

As a guitar player, I have an obligatory notion to create something to do with a guitar. Maybe a guitar string could itself be the visualizer. Or maybe a painting/pattern on the guitar body would display the spectrum, rippling across the surface and manipulating characters in the painting/pattern.

Finally, I'm always interested in designs having to do with water and wetlands. Perhaps the camera could look down on a beach, at the edge of the water. Incoming waves would create the spectrum of audio input, bothering burrowing crabs or resting seagulls. Or maybe wetland brush would display the audio spectrum, and the decaying would, over time, create visible gaps, mirroring wetlands lost by erosion.

Each of these ideas could be fun and interesting, but I need to flesh them out and consider what meanings or feelings they would suggest to the viewer.

I'll be honest, this milestone has been rough. Though I had a clear goal in mind, the process of iteration has been slow. Thankfully, I've been able to implement the main feature of my original idea, a frequency spectrum that interacts with and propels objects. However, creating a mesh and establishing the history waterfall have been failed pursuits – I'm working on the code, and I think I'm just missing a few key elements, but I hope to get those features working soon. I'm not satisfied with where this project stands, but at least there's some 90s charm to it's current look. It should be noted that some of the (albeit unsuccessful) code in this project was inspired by methods used by Cody Hergenroeder in their VaporWave visualizer, found here: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~lemonaut/256a/hw2/index.html

This audiovisualizer is, in a word, wacky. It was inspired by screensavers from the 1990s, with their terrible yet charming graphics with endless watchability. The means of navigation around the centerpiece spectrum is by using the WASD keys to move the camera. This allows for several vantage points from which to observe the chaos.