I am satisfied with how my sound sequencer turned out. I set upon creating something that the user would like to play around with and get a little lost doing for a little while and I wanted it to make it easy for anyone to spend a little time doing something small and ending up with something that sounds very pleasant. I was inspired by the google audio code project, and the appeal of audio visualizations. However, it is not perfect, and I don’t think I achieved that goal of having it feel completely seamless.
There are quite a few problems with the way it works right now. One, the code is set up so that the program loops through all the circles many times in the draw loop, and there are many circles to generate in the visualizations, and because of all these for loops, the sketch lags when there are too many notes. This is problematic because the user is restricted on how many notes he should be playing at a given time. However, I personally like to think of it as a good thing in the sense that if the user is restricted to using few notes, it might inspire a little more creativity. Despite that, it doesn’t aid in a seamless experience for the user to do whatever he or she wants.
Another problem of the sketch is due to the way Processing handles time. Because the draw has a framerate, the milliseconds function only refreshes every frame. This causes the program to be inaccurate and create an inconsistency in the spacing between notes that the user can easily notice it. Although the inconsistency is up to low amount of milliseconds, the ear is very sensitive, and it can pick up on these things and take the user out of the experience. This is something I struggled with dealing with in my program, because time management is so integral to my project. I had to learn how to be clever with handling the coloumns of the notes and use a variable capturing the last millisecond measurement and find the difference.
However, what I do have now are circles falling down from the top of the program, and their position representing their relative frequency. I chose the color pallete to turn it more pastel and playful, and due to the way I ordered the FFT bands, it looks like a nice ice cream cone falling. The visualizations are something I definitely improved upon from my presentations on Friday. I gave the visualizations more meaning for the user. I also added a tempo setting, which the user can have a lot of fun and creativity with.
https://github.com/ra2353/Creative-Coding-S18/tree/master/Soundcircles