Now I know I’m going down the option C route, I thought it prudent to make clear my goals for this project, brainstorm more ideas for what I could do and then decide what frameworks for this project I like the most.
My main goal is to learn skills that I will need for element 2, which is making an installation for a gallery. My practice centres around creating novel things and the process of making them, meaning that the piece would have some level of physicality and probably a digital backing through a BELA board and coding. In this project, I will try to learn and understand Pure Data or at least a program I can use for making sound art. A secondary goal will be to incorporate interactivity into the piece to try to understand what is enjoyable to use for a listener.
Ideas I have based on these goals:
A step sequencer that uses pre-made samples and easy hotkey controls to control the composition of the piece;
A fully fleshed-out hybrid of the noise toaster and a sequencer with again easy hotkey controls for live usage without a mouse;
Simon Says type of game that is played by rebuilding either the sound that is played or the waveform.
A spectrogram player that could take an image and turn into sound.
A composition that is slowly discovered through the movement of a mouse.
A randomised sound piece.
A more complex and in-depth version of painting waveforms that then play as you’re doing it.
While I did play around with a few other ideas, these were the standouts that I could actually imagine fleshing out and following through with. There are 2 prominent ideas that I really like, the randomised piece and the Simon Says type game.
Out of all the ideas they were the only ones that fulfilled the first goal of learning the most. I’ve used pure data in the past and understand how to do basic things in it, and a lot of my ideas were just showing that knowledge or making the patches I know more user-friendly. These 2 ideas I pointed out are both things I have no idea where to even start so I know there is a lot to learn in making them.
One thing I have to think about now is if I should use a different program instead of pure data or in conjunction with it as PD isn’t really that robust graphically compared to other programs and one of these ideas has a visual portion to it. On top of that, I know my art usually has a visual aspect to it but also isn’t conventional in how the audio and the visual interact, making me think that it could be a better idea to use or learn an intermediary program so that I can use that program in conjunction with any other program I use (for example being able to create sound pieces using FFmpeg and the command line).