Raps project1 documentation Jiayan Liu

https://gist.github.com/JiayanLiu27/d3e942ced3ee53e4855a59ff2c281e9f

Title: my happy little moments

The concept behind my project is colorful childhood. My intention is to recall some happy moment during the stressful midterm time. Whenever I play piano, I feel super relaxed, so I decide to use the piano sound for the audio.

My inspiration: We were learning Mozart’s twinkle twinkle little star variation called: ah,vous dirai-je maman which means “talk to me mother” in the piano class. When I was playing different variations, it’s just like little Mozart’s conversation with his mom. I felt that although they sound very different for each variation, they are conducted around the same theme and there’s harmony within. Because they are all composed based on the same theme. So, I am wandering what will it sound like if I remix different variations. This is my starting point and intention behind this project.

Perspective and Context:

I really like how Oskar Fischinger use geometric shapes with primary colors dancing through piano music set against the black background. For me, when it comes to synesthesia, I would to depict the joyful mood in a white background of brighter colors, faster tempos and higher notes.

Development & Technical Implementation:

Audio: I first recorded myself playing two of the variations and the theme. Then I was experiencing how to remix them. I used Granular first to see how a music piece would be like if different small pieces are taken to conduct a new piece. It sounds chaotic but it provides me with idea to make an audio with those bright note piece. So, I picked another two variations with faster tempo and higher notes to create the brightness. And use the classroom samplr and audio mixer to mix them together and play around the settings to reach an ideal volume of the four audio sources.

Video: The problem I encountered first was that no matter how I changed the audio, the video output was always the variations of lines. I want to make geometric shapes like those we’ve watched in class. Another problem I encountered was those the video is only valid for two or three seconds, for the rest of time, it was only repeating what had shown before.

The solution to the both problems is using video mixers to mix different videos together and experiment with different mixing effects. In my previous version, I directly connected different video sources to the video output without a mixer, so It’s invalid. As I mixed the videos together, the non-repetitive image became longer.

Presentation:

In my presentation I found that the sound quality is not very good as I recorded it by my phone. The video went quite well. I wasn’t nerves before class. but as I was the last to present, after I watched others’ projects which are so good the sound and the image fits very nicely. I become nerves about my presentation and worried about the correlation of the audio and video. since my audio doesn’t have a strong structure, I think it’s harder to see the movement relation of the video compared to my classmates’ project.

Conclusion:

I think I could add interactions on this project, as I watched one of the projects that involves piano keyboard playing on the computer keyboard. I can mix the variations and let the users play the theme, the very simple twinkle twinkle little star. It maybe can composed a clearer structure of the audio piece.

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