Draw your music
In the latest Keynote from Steve Jobs at the MacExpo he told his audience that with the new iPhone they can touch their music.
I tell you now that you can DRAW your music with our (I am working together with one of my classmates) project. This project was done within the Digital Media Technologies lesson.
What is this device made of?
It is made out of three parts (as far as hardware is concerned): An overhead projector, a web cam (Standard Logitech web cam) and a computer (only to evaluate the video stream provided by the web cam and for choosing the right sound)
We use Macromedia Director and the Webcam Xtra to produce the Software behind the project. We used Lingo to code the whole thing.
What are we doing with these parts?
We fix the web cam on the OHP so it looks straight into the light. On the OHP we place an OHT. Onto this transparency you can now draw lines (might work with every color but we prefer black). The web cam captures the images and hands it over to the PC. The computer now tries to figure out where on the OHT a black dot exists. As soon as it finds such a dot it does some maths to get the position of the dot. Equivalent to the position of the dot you will hear a lower or a higher sound from the computer.
What is it good for?
Actually there is no point in developing such a device.
Before we were allowed to start with our project we had to follow some guidelines.
One of these guidelines were that you should not implement something that enriches your live or can be used every day by different people. It also should not be a game.
Long story short: It should be a kind of art.
Who can/should used it?
Somebody who likes to play with innovative products.
If you have some practise, you might be able to produce some music.
It also can be used in exhibition - Similar products (and much more sophisticated ones) can be seen in the AEC
The project is not finished yet but we estimate that we will reach completion in about two or three days.
We also have to present our project at college and some of our teachers are going to test this device. I hope that everything will be fine.
This is my first Blog entry written in English. Hopefully there are not too many mistakes in it and you enjoyed reading it. I am pretty sure that there will be more English entries soon.
Regards
Josef