Preparation

Today and yesterday, I have been working on familiarizing myself with JEM. JEM has many useful features, however, several questions have surfaced in this process. Mainly, JEM does not have the same standard library that JES does so I was having difficulty using simple functions that we have used all year. I suspect that the solution may be as simple as importing a library. I will solve this tomorrow in lab.

Because I could not figure out how to import files, I was not successful in playing a midi file in JEM, however, I have researched it on the Jython Music website and feel confident on how it can be done.

I suspect the next big hurdle will be figuring out how to create a dictionary of the notes. The plan of our program is to assign values for the qualities of each midi note, which will require a dictionary of notes.

Project Introduction

Artist’s statement:

As an avid concert go-er and music listener, I speak from my personal preference to say that music is more enjoyable when there are synchronous motion graphics. The problem is that most music listeners do not have access to professional software that does this. Our program will be simple, user friendly, and allow music listeners to have a concert like experience on demand. As waveform analysis seems to be a quite daunting task, our program will run off of midi files. While the user will not be able to chose any mp3 file, the use of midi files will allow our program to be precise with note and beat alignment.

Our program will consist of 2 displays. One being the main display which will show the motion graphics, and the other being the control panel. The control panel will be a simple display with several options that will modify the graphics as well as a play and pause button.

Work schedule:

We plan to meet up at 1 p.m. on Thursdays, for 2 hours, and again on the weekends if necessary.

What we need to learn:

While some understanding of how midi files work will be necessary, a bulk of the work of this project will depend on learning how to use Jython Environment for Music. This is necessary for the use of midi files and playback. Additionally, we will need to better our understanding of graphics and how to make them change size, color, etc in a smooth and pleasing manner.

Our Team Members:

• Calvin Ritger
• Owen Grace
• Sidd Nair
• Tenny McFarlane

Tenny and I have some experience in with music production and processing; we will be able to teach Sidd and Calvin on this aspect of the project. We will all have learning to do on the rest of the code.

 

Stay Tuned!