Author: Bi

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Letter_Candy Bi

Date: 03/01/2020

Author: Yanran Bi

link: https://editor.p5js.org/candy/present/bAX_qqob

Description:

The interactive project “Letter”, is inpired by the traditional form of communication of wrting letters. It keeps its form and interaction in a rather simple way: user can interact by pressing “w” key to start writing letter, pressing “return” to start a new line and “s” to stop writing. The project is inherently a music generator at the same time: each written word is a note playing, symbolized by different color and sizes of rectangles. On the right side of the screen, people can also see the changing of the notes. There are 7 notes in total, generated through probabilities of “CtrlMarkov”.  The project  is expected to convey the conceptual idea of the how we feel when we write a letter to a loved one both through the rhythm and the visual design.

Video Demo:

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Code of Muisc_Drum Beat(Candy)

When thinking of beats, the first impression comes to me is the one we dance to. I went back to some of the dancing beats I listened before, and found surprisingly how less I actually paid attention to one of most important elemets in a music piece. I decided to make a 4/4 beat whose accent is added on the later note rather than the first. Drum sounds were found on freesound.org and composed in p5. To add more varieties, I finally shifted to 8/4 which could allow more notes composing.

I tried also with 6/4 and various sounds at the same time, yet none of them turns out good. The final version I posed is rather simpler and pleasing with lots of pickup notes.

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Code of Music_A6(Candy Bi)

Chapter2 of the book “This is Your Branin on Music” focuses on some musical concepts that can be quite confusing, like rhythm, loudness and harmony. Each of the seven main elements(loudness, pitch, rhythm, melody, harmony, tempo, meter) is well-explained with lots of examples visualizing music pieces. For people who have few knowledge of musical theory like me, the way the author explains helps a lot with understanding, of interpreting the concepts in terms of human brain. For example, rhythm is what we used to recognize the music, tempo is the times we are likely to tap feet in one minute while listening to a piece of music, and meter is related to the strongness or weakness we percerive a note. By playing tricks with the seven elements, musicians successfully engaging their audience.

The chaper also talks about how some sort of “unexpectation” can actually helps to make the rhythm. Rather than lining up lyrics according to each downbeat, using syncopation(drop ahead of the note) or pickup notes(drop after the note) would excite the audience a lot. Backbeat in a typical rhythmic rock music is another example.

In addition to all these above, I found surprisingly the fact that how much music actually relys on human perception to be powerful, as loudness and pitch “doesn’t exist in the world” and “only exists in the mind”. It is also interesting to know that whether a chord sounds good or not really depends on individuals. All these give valuable clues for my future instrument development.