After presentation

After hearing feedback from my presentation I decided to stick with one of my original designs that had a simple black background, this making the effect of the balls light stand out more. Also, I think my previous design had a lot going on that was not necessary.

http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=27137

Final

To make my program suit the theme of transformation more I decided to change the background depending on the amount of times the ball had made a noise. Then have it so that the colours stay there momentarily, this allowing the colours to blend together. The feature of this program that I wanted to highlight is the transformation that occurs between the colours represented by the different notes.

http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=27137

interesting change

While trying to improve my program I tried making it so that the color beams created by playing a note never faded away and every time a beam appeared its colour would mix with other pre egsisting beams. This made a very interesting effect and also made the trail left by the ball more visible

Although I thought this change looked very cool, I also thought that it had lost some of its elegance and simplicity. So I dont think I will use this, although I am still not certain!

development

While testing out my program I thougt to myself that the sound should be more apparant, so I added the sound making panels at the top also. This made the program more interesting and increased its potential. I then thought about some asthetic features I could improve. I added lighter beams of colour on either side of the coloured beam that appeared when a note was played. This added an interesting effect.

sound

I finally then added sound to my program. I went through various different sounds but always went with the idea that each panel repressented a note, so that there would be some kind of structure. I ended up choosing synth sound clips, which suited the asthetic.

Also, as I had planned in my concept, I made it so that the size of the ball could also be changed. First I tried making it so that every time you clicked, the size of the ball would be a random size between 10 and 100 pixels, but this I thought, would give the user less control. So instead the size of the ball increases as you hold down the left mouse button, and when you release it, the ball stays that size.

Because I now had different size balls, I implemented another feature that was in my concept. I made it so that if the ball was small, the sound that the panels made were slightly higher pitch then that of when the ball is larger, similar to how the size of an intrument determines the sound it makes. So in the end Idecided that if the size of the ball was between 5 and 50, the sound wouuld be high pitch, and if the size of the ball was between 50 and 100 the sound would be a lower pitch. 

Also because the ball could be larger, two notes could be played at the same time, this made the sound making part of the program more complex

colours

Next I added colour to the panels, each panel represents a note between A and G. For the colours of the notes I refered to this image.

I thought that these colours were too bold and I wanted something more natural to go with the simplidtic black and white that I had with the colour of the background and ball. So I added equal parts of white to each colour which I thought looked better.

I then added rectangles or stripes, similar to my concept, that also light up depending on which panel had been hit. I also made them sligtly transparent so that the ball left a trail as it moved accros the screen.

I then made the ball change colour as it hit a certain papel, which looked even better.

Ball that lights up

Made the ball look as if it had a light inside it, which made it stand out in the black. Also placed the panels at the bottom of the screen that light up when the ball bounces on it.

Project 2 beginning

Beginning of project, I figured out how to make a bouncing ball but I also tried to make it so that it bounced for quite a long time so that a constant beat could be made. The movement did, however, keep some qualities of a real life ball as it does slow down eventutally. 

Project 2 concept