Yesterday I met Ginah in their studio to test my mock-up and get some impression. The fun part was when they started to jam on the drum that Dario (the drummer of the band) was playing with the device. I had a meeting a couple of month before with Dario and he was really interested about the project but yesterday when he was trying it he conffessed that I didn’t expect that it was so fun to use.
They play for something like two hours with it! Here is a piece of the jam session.
This is a little mock up that I made to do some test. I just mapped some button and a knob with an arduino to control a patch made with Max/MSP. I’m using it to do some user testing/interview in order to figure out the “correct” interactions for each effect, or at least, users impressions… People really enjoyed to play with this thing and from their impressions I figured out that I reached at least one goal up to now: the take a little while to understand how to get what they want, but after few minutes they can predict effects and jam quite easily. People got different results in order to their feeling with tempo, their music experience.
Since I figured out that it seems that there is any kind of archetype to follow to represent an audio sample I chose to found a way to describe it only by showing the properties that I need to know. For instance, this means that I have to represent his length, his volume level, his speed and so on. I don’t need to see the wave shape but at least I have to understand which part could be used on a particular moment, which are more strong and which are quiet. So I’m just sketching out some alternative way to give this information to the user.
Seems that people in general are interested in a game that involved policy. Even if many people would like to add comments and statements to theirs creatures, from a design point of view I would like to build a more consistent gameplay. In the last week, I spent more time in seeing old games gameplay, such as Nights (Sega/Yuki Naka on Sega Saturn, 1996) and many others platform-like to see in which horizontal ways I may enlarge the game experience. After a while, I see that a more focused (=vertical) research on sounds could be an opportunity: so, instead to have a random interaction between creature, I tried to design a more consistent experience around sound. I still don’t know if the final goal of my thesis will aim to a kind of sinesthesia between graphic and sound, but for example Mizuguchi’s work (REZ, EEE) is right now an inspiration for me, even if focused on shoot’em up games, to see a deeper experience about music. My thesis try to involve people in policy trough a videogame, and I have to balance how much the play could be a stand-alone experience from the political support. The key is maybe giving to the people some simple instruments that can become powerful if they play together.
I’m using reason to make simple loops for what will be the animations for my thesis. As you can see in the image, there’s some key items in music syntax, that I want to link with the evolution and the properties of my creature. Right now, I ‘m thinking about reactable as the primary inspiration for the connection between images and sound, so between the actual interaction with my creature.
Thanks to Martina Pagura
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