New direction Following 1st Rehearsal
I write this progress post immediately following my first rehearsal with my featured musician, junior violin student Lorena Limato. We made incredible progress today, and I believe we’ve found the new and improved direction to take the animation in.
Backtracking a bit, the first thing we confirmed was that my audio tech worked with her instrument. This tech centered around a small pickup microphone weaving through her strings and then being lodged in the violin’s bridge. Here, it could pick up her vibrations, vibrating at a different frequency for each note. It took a minimum of twenty minutes to find a way to accomplish this placement in a way that would stay put, so as to avoid any adhesive substance, and also would be out of her way and not impede her playing. From the microphone extended a decent length of 1/4 inch cable, connecting Lorena to the audio interface I had acting as a middle man between the microphone and my laptop. This setup worked like a charm. From there, the audio went into Max where my pitch-tracking code was able to quickly and accurately place the note being played, showing it to the both of us on a grand scale notation. All that’s left in that regard is transferring the MIDI value that Max gets into RGB code for Magic to use.
From there, the rest of the rehearsal was a brainstorming discussion on where the project would go from there. We mostly analyzed the piece we were planning for her to play, the first 6–7 minutes of Vivaldi’s “Summer”. We were doing this because of our new idea, a new way to up the ante with the animation’s reactions to her audio. We’d been discussing how she personally reacts to the piece, and at one point she mentioned how she does see different colors depending on the note, and simultaneously sees entire sections in their own colors. I latched onto this concept and proposed to her the idea of maintaining the reactive coloring of the animation, but timing the background stars to change colors in the sections as she moves through the piece. Additionally, we both liked the visual effect of having the moving stars reactive in size to the volume of her playing. Collectively this created a highly improved animation that we were pleased with and I felt met the feedback of the critique last week. We have a second rehearsal scheduled for later next week, where I will have these stars changing correctly and will have color mapped each note to her specifications.
