3.4 Interactive Rhythm Study – Smiling Flowers

Smiling Flowers

I designed this draft first with the idea that when the rain falls down, if the leaves are blowed just like when the drum is played something will vibrate, the water drops on it will also fall down. However, in the later sketch I actually designed, the water drop part is deleted due to the time limit. The photo of the flowers I chose is designed by Takashi Murakami, which is humorous for me to some extent. The interaction is designed in the way that leaves will appear when mouse is clicked on the stem and each stem of the flowers has eight position where leaves will come out. The eight position represent eight bars and when the all the bars connected together, it generates a piece of beat. Users can also click on the leaves to make it disappear and the sound the leaf represented will also disappear in the beat. The entire sketch is similar to a drum pad but in a funny way with the flower and leaves. The bee on the left of the entire sketch will highlight which bar is played right now.

Throughout the coding process, I found that using arrays to play several tracks is really convenient and the way of trigger the sound by clicking the mouse can add funs to the interaction. I also had questions about how the two dimensional arrays work when I choose to let the steps in the vertical dimension and I tried to seek help from our TA Spencer. With the help from Spencer, I found that it is because when I define cell[j][i] = ! cell[i][j] which just flipped the tracks and steps and I also made mistakes in drawing the ellipse by stating the cellWidth and cellHeight opposite.

The final sketch looks like below.

Note:

  • The drum samples are all downloaded from the website SampleFocus.
  • The pictures of flowers designed by Takashi Murakami are downloaded from Pinterest.

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