In this blog, I’ll be talking about my final idea through my initial statement for the project, why it is my final idea and what I need to do to achieve it.
My Initial statement/plan for the project is as follows –
“Making a pseudorandomised interactive “audio jungle”. This will be achieved by creating a patch in Pure Data to generate the sounds and then using Touch OSC to let it communicate with Processing 4 for the visual/interactive aspect of the project.
The plan is for there to be around 6-8 layers of sound in which each layer will all around 2-5 different possible noise generators that will either be synthesised sound that mimics the sounds of nature or the sounds of urban living.
Every time the program in Processing is run, 1 noise generator will be picked for each layer, in which certain parameters in that noise generator are randomised within a range.
The Processing portion of the project will act as the controller and the visual aspect of the piece. When the patch is run, each layer of sound would be able to be turned on by moving the cursor into its section of the window. All the sections overlap in the middle and make something akin to a ven-diagram so that every sound would be played when the cursor was in the middle of the screen.
There would be around 12-30 different noise generators with 6 layers or 16 to 40 generators with 8 layers. If having that many digital outputs/inputs communicate with Processing is not viable, having the parameters of 8 different noise generators randomise would be a good alternative. “
I’ve decided to fuse the randomise sound project with a soundscape patch similar to what Milo showed in class, using PD as the audio engine and Processing 4 as the GUI. I picked this over the other favourited idea as the Simon Says game was way too complex for me to understand when I tried to learn a few things about how to go about it and it sounded like a brilliant idea for the gallery space instead. I opted to use Processing 4 and OSC and the intermediary between the 2 programs as it seemed like a useful thing to understand for future projects.
The things I need to decide for this project are what sounds I will include in the soundscape, how to use pure data in a more detailed way, how to use processing and by extension the Java coding language(I believe) and how to get them to communicate with OSC.
What I could foresee happening with this project is that I might be overestimating the abilities of OSC especially after briefly researching it and realising about messages between Processing and Pure Data are limited in a way that it would be easy to make a lot of mistakes.
Also, the number of noise generators and the number of controllable variables are subject to change as I do think there are far too many in the initial statement and it’s too complex to be enjoyable to interact with.