Concept:
For this project, I decide to create a design includes interactivity with sound. When I looked at how musicians create their music, they always apply something called as “soundtrack” that could be dragged around to edit their produced songs. So, for this midterm project, I decide to build on this concept.
However, it would be too technical if I just recreate a soundtrack control system and it wouldn’t be very artistic. To add certain aesthetics to the design and to simplify the system. I decided to create a visual system that is similar to this picture.
With different color representing different sound, user could drag the gridlines to increase/decrease the length of certain sound. With colored blocks designated to certain sound, I decrease the difficulty to choose which sounds are available to the sound track. Also, I want to design a system in which the user could click on the grid inside and change the color(grid) of the sound. There should also be a play button which plays the sound block once the user finish design the block.
Complex parts:
I always insist on making my design graphically dominant. Ideally, there’s no word included in the system. However, I want to achieve the effect of asking users to discover they could drag the grid lines so that they could alter the duration of a certain sound. Also, the operation of changing the color of the grid should also be very intuitive.
Design:
There should be a class for blocks as user could alter the color of the grid and the width of the grid.
First Stage work:(press f to enter full screen)
As displayed above, this version is extremely crude.
There are several Improvements I could make in the coming week
- the entire interface should be more user friendly, right now it’s just ugly.
- it should be a 5*5 grid instead of a 1*5 grid
- the grid line alter function should be designed more beautifully
- there should be no word instruction
However, this version works right now, and I can play with the sound to make some simple music.