Mock Presentation

This Thursday is our mock presentations are on. We must follow the list of deliverables that our on our brief, we plan to split the presentation up into 5 different sections so we can all speak about what our project is and talk about the different areas that we are all planning on working on individually. Some of the deliverables include gantt charts etc...

We have to meet up before wednesdays class so when do ya's want to meet up?? Like what suits everyone, i'm easy!!

Development of the Idea

Our idea has come along a lot since we first came up with it a few days ago.

The slant we decided to put on it to make it more original was to base the concept of our idea around the theme of feelings. In the first week our lecturers asked us what do we want the user to feel, with this idea the user can feel whatever they want to feel (they can choose from a selection of feelings for example angry, sad, happy etc). We plan to convey these feelings by letting the user interact with different genre's of audio/music i.e. heavy metal for angry etc.

How is the project going to work??

Well for example taking the genre of Happy, and that the user has decided to play the drums from our instrumental floor, a happy song (upbeat and relaxing) would be playing in the background. However the song would be minus the drum element that we would have subtracted from the song, we will take the complete drum part to the song and slice it up into small segments (parts), we will then encode all of these segments into a sequence that the user would have to reproduce by physically standing on the drum section of our instrumental floor and stepping on the parts of the drum that light up to keep the sequence going and the song flowing.

If it is the happy genre that is selected, the song/sequence would be nice and slow and easy to keep the happy feeling flowing. We will explore a lot more feelings that can be expressed through this means. For example if the user wants to feel energetic/active we could have a nice fast paced song and a rapid moving sequence to make the user move quickly.

We will research this area a lot more and see what else we can incorporate in. We are excited about this new idea and feel strongly that it is original enough to get the go ahead from our presentations, with a bit of luck...!!

New Member / Roles within the group

Today, a new member joined our group, WELCOME SAMMY! :)

and with this new entry to the group, we have also been thinking about group project roles, and after meeting, we have decided upon our roles:

James - Project Manager / All-rounder

Paul - Concept Development / Graphics/ Programmer

Tunde - Audio

Neo - Programmer

Sammy - Interaction Design

These group roles will give us a clear indication of how we ourselves will go about creating the project. Also, I set up a forum for us to privately chat.... http://floormotion.forummotions.com/forum.htm

Who, What, Why, How???

Our instrumental floor now has feelings! we based our new idea around feelings so that the user has more of an involvement emotionally to the project, we feel this adds a greater spin on the idea, and allows it to develop more personally with each individual. We have been researching constantly since the change of our idea at this late time. but we have a solid idea of where we are heading now...

Who? - The project its aimed at people who want to express feelings through music, wether they are musically experienced or not. And the age group we have on it is, 13+ (because we felt that any age younger would not be able to experience or understand the emotive side of the project).

What? - The User will be interacting with audio sounds, through a sequence, and expressing their feelings through sounds

Why? - we aim to create a unique experience (that hopefully a user will want to use) by expressing emotion through interactive audio.

How? - Right now we are not worrying about this part of the project and will comeback to it, after presentations, but to give a short insight to the project... We will be using an interactive floor idea, with musical instruments. These instruments will be active through touch, and since its o the ground, the user will be interacting with it through there feet. They can choose an emotion to use to coincide with each instrument, just for example, angry, they will be playing a fast beat, sad, they will be playing a slow beat etc.

That is what we have come up with in the space of literally 2 days, so I think good progress, we will post up mockups of the design as soon as we can, but for now, let your imagination wonder.

New Idea

After extensive research previous to this idea, we seemed to get caught out by our supervisor's at every corner that we took, so we decided to take a step back, and look at the project from a user and outsiders point of view. After doing some research on different projects, Paul came up with a great idea, having found inspiration from a film.... The idea was to have a floor that the user could interact with and turn it into different musical instruments... I thought, "GENIOUS". We were not getting good feedback through our other project and found that there were a lot of loose ends with the project, that not many members of the group could get to grips with or understand. Myself and Paul, met up this morning and went through the fundamental plot of the new idea he had in mind, and after he explained it, I was on board, so from now on, we will be working on a (currently untitled project) interactive instrumental floor.

The floor will be aimed at people who have no musical expirience, and no interest in learning how to play an instrument, but just want to have fun with different sounds. You do not have to know how to play it (of course it would help), but just experiment around with different sounds of the instruments under your feet (or you could get down on your knee's and play).

We will be designing how the floor looks using Adobe workstations (perhaps Photoshop/Illustrator), and have contacts if in case any construction is needed to build anything. Of course we are going to try create less hassle then anything else, but worst case scenario... we do have people. We have talked about what material the floor will be constructed out of, and we have settled on a plastic sheet, with the instruments printed onto it.

After, the first (mini) meeting we had today, we decided to stick to this idea, as time was becoming late in terms of project and presentation times. But at the same time, it is something we as a group are interested in doing. We are looking forward to getting on with this project. After researching it this morning, I could find anything that was related to what we want to do (then again the web is a big place), so for this reason, I am happy to be participating in something that hasnt been tried many times before...

Twitter

I just set up a twitter account for us at

http://twitter.com/Loopz_dkit

Putting Our Spin On Our Idea

James I was checking out completely different ideas that you can interact with audio, I was searching the internet and came up with the idea of kinda using the idea that we had originally, but instead of a touch screen put it on the floor.... Not exactly what we planned originally we can explore different things/ways of putting stuff down, we can incorporate visuals too, check out these links. I got the idea from the film big, check this out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KosJK_ZMMu0 and here is a link to a page that is exploring the idea even further http://www.gesturetek.com/gesturefx/introduction.php?gclid=CNy4ipqF8aQCFQ_-2AodjyYx2Q. I think we could do something really cool if we mixed both, what do ya think??

Logo

In our recent meeting, we were discussing the design and interface design of our project, all group members will be working closely together to get the look and feel of the design correct, and rightfully reflecting the aim and idea of the project. We discussed the logo design of the project, this will have to be made as soon as the we get the go ahead from our supervisor's as to promote and 'sell' the project, and as to give it a sort of "Brand" feeling. We were thinking that, since the name of the project (so far) is Loopz, it will have a kind of spiral or circular feeling (is what I'm thinking anyway). Some colour schemes I am looking at, at the moment are, Grey, Blue, Yellow. Obviously these will not be the defined final colours that will be used but thats just my idea so far, and things are liable to change in these early days, as I said, we still havn't got the go ahead for the project. But, Soon..........

Group Meetings

Our last class, we decided that our meetings would take place before the wednesday class. we have yet to decide when the time will be, but all of us are still researching our idea's and keeping each other informed of our progress with their part of the project, be it promotion, research etc. we are all doing our part. Our project will be aimed at people who know nothing about music, our project will hopefully ecourage them to have fun with different sounds and audio. We are trying to envisage how we will finally implement this, possibly a game, or a simple sequence, either way we are exploring a multitude of different ways of how a user may be attracted to using this final project, and how they will interact with it.

I have been delegated the role of project manager, while the other roles of who will take on audio, visuals, programming have yet to be properly assigned, we will all be helping each other in these areas.

While researching this morning, I thought I would throw up a few images so that people have a bit of an idea of what our group wants to do...

Recent inspiration

Show this in class yesterday by the lecturer, this is a similar idea to the one our group want to implement, which I found was great inspiration, check out this website, for an idea of what is ahead for us, also check the vid: http://www.beatbearing.co.uk/

Loopz

This is the first post of the DkIT CM3 Project Loopz. Loopz is an interactive audio piece that aims to inspire the user to have fun and enjoy audio sounds. The Group Consists of James Butterly, Tunde Esho, Paul Genockey and Chenhao Pang.

Our idea, is aimed at people who don't know anything about music and wish to mess around in a creative way to get a better understanding of sounds and structure