WEEK 3: 1/27 – 1/31

This week has been in a bit of a flux for the team. We, as a team, are still trying to figure out exactly what we are going to create as our deliverable. We’re still in the blue sky phase, but our technical research is ongoing.

We got hold of our decorations for the room and began decorating our room with posters and lights. This will be an ongoing process for us as we will continue to add more artwork as we create art for the project.

After analysing Dr. Thomas’ last email, we as a team, had a few internal questions about we wanted to achieve. Having decided right from the start that we wanted to create something more than just a graphic visualizer, we asked ourselves how we can make the experience more than just that. We researched about different technologies such as Myo gesture control, a band that can be worn on the hands and read your muscle movements, and considered using the Makey Makey. We were thinking about making the experience more than just about listening to music, but make it about the experience of creating music. We thought it would be interesting to pull data from the musicians themselves, such as their heart rate, or muscle movements and incorporate that into the visual experience.

We presented a more concentrated approach to the deliverable to Dr. Thomas. We introduced these ideas to her and presented her an ‘ecosystem’ idea, where different cellular creatures represented each instrument. Dr. Thomas was very enthused about this sort of setting, giving us freedom to use any sort of technology and visuals we saw fit. She did reiterate though, that the focus for her experiment was to see how visuals enhanced music listening experience and was skeptical about using any sort of audience interaction that could distract from the experience. We ended the meeting by getting a performance from Dr. Thomas of the musical pieces. We also got a copy of the sheet music which we could use for our internal testing.

On the technical side, we researched about some software such as Max MSP, and SuperCollider. These are existing software for creating visual based on musical notes. We have to go beyond that and hence decided to do something with gesture control and picking up musicians’ movements. We also did extensive research with Dave Purta regarding sound recording equipment and the digital conversion. We worked with the latency issues and found out what equipment would be best suited for us, with acceptable latency.

We also made good progress as far as our team branding is concerned. We went through multiple iterations of our team poster, which will also double as our half-sheet. We will be shooting our team photo on Monday which would complete all our team branding.