Idea No.2

With this idea, we wanted to look at sonification and how we can represent sound and music digitally. Natalie and Iain play an online game called 'Mine Craft'. Where the player can build and mold his own world according to what you want to do, you can build great castles, houses, farms, roller coasters  pretty much anything you can imagine. 

There is a musical creation mode on the game, where you can tune and program your own music using these items known as curious objects. You put those together with other various 'curious objects' and you can create music, and songs and just random awesome noises. 

This is a really in depth video of what I am talking about, and how to make music.

Eventually when we looked into this project, we thought it wouldn't be our own work, be piggy backing of the back of someone else's hard work, plus this has been done many times before. We felt it wasn't really worth our time and effort, as this is more of a hobby exercise for people that are really into Minecraft. In a sonification sense, this would be an interesting idea to go for as you are creating your own music digitally, piece by piece. 



Sonifikeyboard

We looked into keyboard manipulation as well as our Minecraft idea, switching the keys around to get it to do something else. We would take a QWERTY keyboard, take out the keys and replace with them our own touch keys, switch the inputs to force the computer to create something visually stunning. Most likely use processing, as well as playing a different note when we press the specific keys.

Natalie has drawn up some designs.



We'll be looking into audio and visual outputs, creating something that is shown below in the video would be amazing, but technically very difficult. 

The group have been talking about using this device as an educational device, teaching children from all ages about music using visual aids on a compute screen, instead of having to read sheet music, which from my experience can be very frustrating and hard. If the learning musician had such a device that they can connect various notes and keys with visuals than they would learn faster and more efficiently. 

There has been reported cases of musicians seeing lights and colours while they play their instrument, this can be common among pianists, this is also a variety of synesthesia. Look at my previous blogs for more about synesthesia.