For my Intro to IM Final Project, I wanted to do something that helps me feel so “free” in the sense of creativity: visual arts, together with something I get so excited to experience: music. I’d like to weave both visual arts and music into an interactive art gallery with rooms containing a visual scene with background music. Unlike a traditional art gallery, this art gallery comes with an “escape room” challenge: each art room is a phase of an “escape room” challenge for which users must interact with through musical jamming to reach the next phase (or proceed to the next art room). Once all phases are passed, the user successfully completes the escape room challenge! In this way, users should interact with every artwork in the art gallery if they are to pass this “escape room” challenge.
User decisions can be enabled by analog/digital sensors. For example, users can control an avatar using joysticks to move up, right, left, or down within the escape room setting (eg. a big treehouse). The user should use clues involving the visual artwork and the musical sounds heard from p5js to figure out a solution that involves jamming in a corrected/accepted way to pass the phase and reach the next phase. The jamming could be through a “piano” made with force sensitive resistors (FSR), each connected to a buzzer. The connection of each FSR to a buzzer is crucial as it enables multiple musical notes to be heard at the same time.
The above is the minimum viable product. I was also inspired by the generative text data project from week 4 which involves creating a poem from a corpus of words. If time allows, an additional feature could be incorporated: after the escape room challenge is completed, the user can try to create poem artwork by jamming. Based on the user’s choices, each word of the poem on an artwork are selected and displayed.