Weekly Update with Project Progress and Ethical Discussion
The time that has passed since my previous entry in this series has allowed me to make great progress with this project, both with its construction and the logistics of its final performance in late April. Firstly, the visual animations are nearly complete, leaving the coding of the project as the bulk of my remaining work. With the coding, I have successfully created and implemented a coding patch within Max 7 MSP that is communicating MIDI data to the Magic Visual Software. With further testing and experimentation and testing, this connection will be stabilized, its parameters and measurements narrowed down, and its effect on the animation perfected. The coding is successful due in part to the plugged in live-pitch-tracking Max patch known as “Fiddle”, which specializes in detecting the specific timbre of a string instrument, particularly the violin.
For the logistics of the performance, the persisting block I am facing is finding a violinist who is available the night of the show after Lorena has to leave. I have widened my search to the entire string student body of the music department, rather than asking the juniors and seniors who I already know. They, like me, are incredibly busy as well, leading me to think I’d have better success with a second or even first year student.
On a final note for this update, I wanted to raise a different topic, and that is the ethical values involved with this project. This includes the ethical influences behind its creation, as well as the ethical message it’s attempting to convey. Most, if not all, forms of media face and/or try to solve an ethical issue in society, whether it’s inclusion, a social justice issue, or even a community engagement and building exercise. Personally, my media work has dealt with and challenged such social topics as victim blaming, or even simple general acceptance. With my project for this series, the audio visualizer, I’ll admit my original thought process was that it’d just be cool if an image reacted to music, and granted that is still a factor in my motivation. However, once I began my research over these past several months, and came across things like synesthesia and chromesthesia were, I was amazed. But then I was shocked, as nobody I mentioned this to had a clue what I was talking about. I then felt obligated to redirect my project slightly to aim it toward bringing this to the public’s attention. Not only the occurrence itself, but the intriguing life experiences that go along with it. Is it a social issue, or some dark horror that the world needs to know about, but doesn’t? Certainly not, but that doesn’t take away from the idea of sharing something new with the communitty. This has become my drive for the project, showing something new and, honestly, incredible, to the local community, and using the media skills I’ve learned to do so.
