10.21.17 | Week 8. Blog Debrief
This week I took some time refining the mechanics of the music process. I think it's going to play out something like this:
- There's 4 voices or tracks per the entire song. The first three are tonal, which could be broken up into something like lead, chorus, and bass, or all three could be used for polyphony to emulate hitting multiple tones on a single instrument, like guitar chords or harmony with a pipe organ. The fourth channel is used for percussion.
- The three melodic tracks are on a single "buffer" while the percussion is on its own, although the two are going to play in lockstep to avoid desyncing. What this means is that the melodies can be of a different length than the percussion, but due to how the clips are built at specified lengths, they won't ever fall out of sync.
- For example, "jazz_1" might be 1 measure long, and could be played in tandem with any drum clip, like "dnb_1", "dnb_2", "amenbreak", "ashesbreak", etc. even though the drum clips are 4 measures long. jazz_1 would play 4 times before either of the two clips switched over to a new one.
- This also works conversely: if you had a long melody (think a guitar solo) that was 16 measures long, you could loop a single drum beat that entire time, but you could just as easily cycle between multiple before that clip finishes.
- From a sensor standpoint, the heartbeat sensor and accelerometer affecting tempo do so additively, rather than directly trying to modify the tempo 1:1. The reasoning should be fairly obvious - if someone's heartbeat is only in a range of 80-90 for a period of time it's not going to be hugely noticeable, for example. Since the heartbeat sensor and accelerometer won't be affecting tempo concurrently, they can roughly adhere to the same values. So, the tempo is (mostly) going to be 120 by default, although given jazz and DnB are involved other tempos like 90 or 150 are probably going to crop up here and there.
- I'm thinking the tempo range is going to be constrained between 60 and 180 overall. Heartbeats in adults at rest on average are anywhere from 59-99bpm, and I've got a really slow heartbeat on average for whatever reason (60s/70s), but given normal people are going to be playing with this I'm probably going to constrain the heartbeat's "effective" range from 60-120, with 120 representing light physical activity. This nicely provides a range of 60, which means a heartbeat of 120 could add 60 to ramp a default tempo of 120 up to 180, while a heartbeat of 60 could subtractively effect a default tempo of 120 down to 60.
- Likewise, the accelerometer provides a very nice range of values to alter the tempo in a similar fashion: I'm going to be constraining the accelerometer's lateral velocity from 0-60mph, since the highway pretty much mandatory for getting around in this area and 30mph would be roughly average speed in town. The level of influence is the same as the heartbeat, ex. 60mph = boost tempo up to 180bpm.
- There's 4 voices or tracks per the entire song. The first three are tonal, which could be broken up into something like lead, chorus, and bass, or all three could be used for polyphony to emulate hitting multiple tones on a single instrument, like guitar chords or harmony with a pipe organ. The fourth channel is used for percussion.
- The three melodic tracks are on a single "buffer" while the percussion is on its own, although the two are going to play in lockstep to avoid desyncing. What this means is that the melodies can be of a different length than the percussion, but due to how the clips are built at specified lengths, they won't ever fall out of sync.
- For example, "jazz_1" might be 1 measure long, and could be played in tandem with any drum clip, like "dnb_1", "dnb_2", "amenbreak", "ashesbreak", etc. even though the drum clips are 4 measures long. jazz_1 would play 4 times before either of the two clips switched over to a new one.
- This also works conversely: if you had a long melody (think a guitar solo) that was 16 measures long, you could loop a single drum beat that entire time, but you could just as easily cycle between multiple before that clip finishes.
- From a sensor standpoint, the heartbeat sensor and accelerometer affecting tempo do so additively, rather than directly trying to modify the tempo 1:1. The reasoning should be fairly obvious - if someone's heartbeat is only in a range of 80-90 for a period of time it's not going to be hugely noticeable, for example. Since the heartbeat sensor and accelerometer won't be affecting tempo concurrently, they can roughly adhere to the same values. So, the tempo is (mostly) going to be 120 by default, although given jazz and DnB are involved other tempos like 90 or 150 are probably going to crop up here and there.
- I'm thinking the tempo range is going to be constrained between 60 and 180 overall. Heartbeats in adults at rest on average are anywhere from 59-99bpm, and I've got a really slow heartbeat on average for whatever reason (60s/70s), but given normal people are going to be playing with this I'm probably going to constrain the heartbeat's "effective" range from 60-120, with 120 representing light physical activity. This nicely provides a range of 60, which means a heartbeat of 120 could add 60 to ramp a default tempo of 120 up to 180, while a heartbeat of 60 could subtractively effect a default tempo of 120 down to 60.
- Likewise, the accelerometer provides a very nice range of values to alter the tempo in a similar fashion: I'm going to be constraining the accelerometer's lateral velocity from 0-60mph, since the highway pretty much mandatory for getting around in this area and 30mph would be roughly average speed in town. The level of influence is the same as the heartbeat, ex. 60mph = boost tempo up to 180bpm.
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