Filed under: MDDN242

Lights or no Lights

Now added with lights, I'm not sure whether or not I like them.

The lights are effectively the notes of the bar, so if you rotate the image clockwise 90 degrees you should be able to read the notes left to right top to bottom.

The colors of the lights are the same as the colors from the very first score piece I did for p4. However, they are quite bright, not in light but in color intensity. The very obvious primary colors seem to make the city look like a game of tetris. I might contrast this by making the colors very similar in shades of grey or white with a tint of a change of color.

I hope to make the gradient (the purple background) the same color as the most used note in the score. Since a city would illuminate the same color as the most of its own lights.

Screen_shot_2012-06-15_at_11

New direction for project 4

So I have taken a new direction with project four. Whilst being similar to ones in the past I am taking it back to a more literal representation of music rather than an abstract, which was getting a little ridiculous. 

So new idea. I draw a city skyline which seems random at first but is actually built by the musical score that is inputted, as before.

Each building represents a bar of music from the score and the building is generated from this bar. The height is based upon how many notes are included in the bar, the number of windows representing different notes in sequence (so you should be able to read it bottom to top, left to right, though it might be very tricky). Rooftops are, at the moment, randomly generated but I'm sure I can get them generating from the octave of the notes easily or other similar musical effect. Colors of buildings and windows are yet to be implemented and the width of the building has yet to be made. These are things that will be done in the next week.

However, the real tie between the music and the city is the choice of music, and the choice of city. To bring both parts together, to make a truely musically generated city I have used inspiration and real images of skyscrapers of New York as my buildings, and as an accompaniment I have chosen the music of Swing Jazz, the music invented and thouroughly inspired from New York. The decision to use this city and this music was just coincidental. I could effectively create a village scape similar to an African village and put in African music. However, the music of Swing Jazz and Bebop was the music I had wanted to work with as it is my definition of pure musical art, and I wanted to take this further and create a piece of generated art from the music.

Here is a screenshot of the current project from the music "Night and Day". I hope to develop and improve on the graphics, increase the generative aspects and try different muscial pieces to see how it all falls together.

Screen_shot_2012-06-15_at_9

Wavy Lines

This one now includes wavy lines. The image indicates where different midi channels / instruments are used in the piece. Along the middle is a timeline of the music and colored lines are pulled from this to seperate nodes. Each node is seperate for different instruments.

 

Screen_shot_2012-06-14_at_1