I am making a musical wand for my Music Interaction Design class. I would like to visualize the musical elements created by the wand using a particle system as in this example and this example from Jason Sigal (@therewasaguy on Github). I have been wanting to investigate FFT’s and isolating specific musical frequencies as characters and have them act as a flock, following the root note and oscillating in conjunction with the beat and each specific amplitude.
There is also a machine learning example I toyed with from earlier in the semester where I tried to isolate specific frequencies in a musical piece and animate them separately, to some success.
I feel like the wand, or baton depending on the context, is a universal and immediate interaction that will be engaging for audiences of all ages and musical skill levels. My vision is to have this wand live as an exhibit with both artistic and educational aspects. I will be building a number of “scenes” to use with the wand and I want to incorporate a particle system as one. Here are some examples of work from earlier in the semester (here) and from ICM (here and here) which would also be scenes for the wand.