Leaky Windows
Homework 3, Milestone 3
In creating Leaky Windows, I wanted to turn something that has been a nuisance in my life into something fun and playful. After noticing that leaks usually have some sort of steady rhythm, I wanted to harness that energy and be able to “control” multiple leaks to create a musical melody. I added a background rain noise as well to complete the stormy environment.
My sequencer has many options, and they are enabled by the user controls listed below. The sequencer starts out as only playing rain drop noises, and once you click the lamp to turn a window on, then users are able to toggle the cup types to play various instruments — the triangle, steel drum, cello, and violin. In order to manipulate rhythms a little more, I added a towel option that functions as a rest (no sound is played). Tempo can be changed by raising or lowering the blinds, and individual cups gain/rate are also adjustable. This way, I hoped to give users the most flexibility when designing musical motifs.
The most difficult part of this assignment was getting a handle on how Chuck and Unity communicate variables to each other. I started out with just one window, and once I had that functionality down, the next challenge was replicating it across three more windows. Understanding how sporking works in Chuck was a bit of a puzzle, but it worked out in the end! I felt much better approaching this assignment compared to the spectrum/waveform visualization assignment. There was less of the “what IS Chuck” energy since we had all completed one project, so I had a more comprehensive picture of the architecture of Chunity that allowed me to focus more on adding functionality to my sequencer.
All the models, except for the towels, were modeled and textured by me between Blender and Unity meshes. Built for MacOS.
Keyboard/Mouse User Controls:
- B: change to blue cup (rain drops)
- R: change to red cup (steel drums)
- G: change to green cup (triangle)
- O: change to orange cup (violin)
- K: change to black cup (cello)
- Space bar: change to towel (rest)
- A: move selector left
- D: move selector right
- Left arrow: increase rate
- Right arrow: decrease rate
- Comma: decrease gain
- Period: increase gain
- Up arrow: move cup up (different sounds for each cup type)
- Down arrow: move cup down (different sounds for each cup type)
- Minus (-): Camera view of all four windows
- Click on windowsill: Camera view of selected window to edit
- Click on upper blind pully: increase tempo
- Click on lower blind pully: decrease tempo
- Click on lamp: toggle to enable“musical” cup types (red, orange, green, black)
Unity package linked here.