Smiley Audio Visualizer
This is my first attempt at an Audio Visualizer. I used the waveform to create the mouth of the classic smiley face. The eyes change scale according to the volume of the sound input.
Things I need to debug during office hours:
Expanding the camera past -1000 in the z direction to include the whole smiley face
Creating a parent face object so that history can be added with cascading smiley faces getting more transparent as they move father backward.
Nuanced design changes could make the Smiley face more engaging:
I’d like the eyes to change size a bit more dramatically, and the waveform could be adjusted to be more mouth-like.
I wanted to change the overall shape of the mouth to smile or frown based on the pitch by implementing a parabola shape with a coefficient between -.1 and .1 to the y-component, but my attempts failed so far.
I’m still pretty uncomfortable with Unity and Chunity, so my goal for the visualizer became to get something done. I still hope to make something kaleidoscoping, colorful, and entrancing in the future!
I didn’t get to present Monday so thankfully I got to iterate on my design, figured out how to zoom out the camera, and added spectral histroy in blood red rings around smiley! Here’s a rushed demo recorded outside of CCRMA before Wednesday class:
I used a Rhodey piano with LPF and delays to play an electronic version of the song 90210, I then played the real song with a BPF filter, a small delay, and implemented a sweep filter to alter the original song. The narrative is supposed to be, Smiley likes random audio input, and the real version of the song, but not my attempt at electronic music. It stops rotating, turns red, and frowns when the Rhodey piano and filtered bass kick drums play, but is a rotating smiley rainbow visualizer otherwise. You press and hold “A” to make the visualizer rainbow, smile, and rotate.
Some kind of system Error prevented me from running files in miniaudicle for a couple of days. I had the visualizer and the audio narrative finished enough, but when I went to connect them, unity crashed. I restarted my computer when miniaudicle started throwing this error as well, and it still didn’t let me play files, even after I deleted all code from unity and got my visualizer running again. Eventually, it randomly started working again, pretty taxing not knowing what’s going on with a program, and errors aren’t as googlable in lesser-known languages.
Although it was pretty fun to work on, the time spent fixing random bugs, and system errors greatly overshadowed the time I got to spend being creative and getting done what I wanted to do: following design principles like adding multiple instances, making things glow, implementing camera movement or gravity… etc. But this was a great learning experience in patiently trying to figure out small goals and being ok with your best efforts on something that’s new to you (i.e. trying not to compare with others).