Weekly Reflection 10

I received some helpful feedback last week about both parts of my project thanks to my professor.

“Color is too important to be redundant.”

My original idea for color was to use it for pitch along with the position on the y-axis. However, given that y-position already equates to pitch, having color also represent pitch is redundant and doesn’t make much sense. That being said, I’ve been messing around with different ways to make color work in the demo piece. It’s a lot of fun trying to figure out the different ways that color can affect a musical piece because there’s SO much you can do with color. My few ideas right now are to have pitch equate to brightness and color equate to instrumentation or mood/key.

In regards to the real-time animation, Chris has given me some code to work off of that animates a visual based on random MIDI values, but does not work with MIDI input. As of now, I have 3 separate sketches that do different things and I need to find some way to combine those 3 to come up with my own version.

In addition to working out the kinks in my project and final detailing, I’ve been conducting research again on other visual music works. So far, I’ve looked at Oskar Fischinger and Close Encounters. Fischinger uses simple shapes and colors to represent melodic material, typically with geometric shapes and one or two colors at a time. Close Encounters, on the other hand, used a multitude of colors across a grid, of sorts, to communicate with the aliens. Among the other examples that I have to finalize the research on are Scriabin, modern examples, The Rite of Spring/The Firebird, and some academic research from my proposal. I’m in the final stretch, with about 10% of my project to complete. In the next coming weeks, it’ll just be a matter of adding minor changes and fixes.