Published posts

I published all my posts on the same day, as I kept them as drafts to go over at the end, to make sure they were all coherent and linear.
I have found keeping a blog much easier and better to keep up to date with. I find sketchbooks quite hard, and seeing as most of my work has been on a computer, I can add things to the blog as soon as I've done the work.

Problems

After I'd figured out what I wanted to do for my final piece (about a few days before hand in) I ran into some problems. 

Certain parts of the sound effector tutorial I followed didn't seem to work. The software was not allowing me to add texture to my shapes. I tried for hours to figure it out, to no avail. I even asked people in my class for their advice, the only people who knew how to use Cinema 4D.

I also had problems with my sound files - my WAV. file formats weren't working in C4D for some reason.. Even though the software supported my previous wav files. I figured it out in the end, after a few hours - it turned out that the sample rate was too high, so I had to edit and convert them so that they worked..

By this time, the texture problem still wasn't working out, and I didn't want to spend many hours making this animation, if it wasn't going to work out how I expected. It turns out that using new software can let you down...

Final Piece Final Idea

Even though I originally wanted to make a stop motion music video, my idea changed pretty drastically towards the end - it would no longer be a music video. 

After I started playing with Cinema 4D, I got told to test its possibilities by recording 'soundscapes'. It was now more to do with synaesthesia than it was in the beginning. So I decided to make it 'a day in the life of a synaesthete'. 

I recorded sounds throughout my day, and I was to pair these sounds with certain shapes in C4D, and give them different colours and movements based on the types of sounds. So I would still be in keeping with the pairing of colours/shapes to frequencies etc.

Here is a list of the sounds I recorded and the shapes I want to pair them with:

Kettle - little spheres, like bubbles

Toaster - one small disc on its side, moving up and getting bigger as toaster 'pops'.

Door opening/closing/locking - Icosahedron 

Footsteps down stairs - two discs getting bigger with the loudness of each step

Skateboard - torus (a ring) spinning around like a wheel

Lift at uni - tube, going up and down

Writing with pen - cone (lengthening, getting sharper with scribbles)

Typing - cubes (cuboids)

Photocopying - cylinder (horizontal, moving sideways with sounds)

Then the sounds can start to build up, one over the other:

Lift again

Skateboard again

Door again (coming back home)

After the door is heard closing, all the sounds stop.

Then:

Brushing teeth - small long capsule, moving sideways

Rain on window - tiny pyramids upside down, falling up and down to look like rain

Then the rain sound will fade until the shapes and sounds stop completely.

Here is a link to all my sound files that I prepared for this

sounds

Soundscape

I decided to record some sounds around the house - I made sure I tried to get different frequencies. I clanged glasses with tweezers to get high pitched sounds, and I also hit the body of my guitar to try and get lower notes. I decided to get lower frequencies by playing bass notes on my guitar.

With these sounds, I then tried to make the shapes be effected differently. I like that you can visually 'see' each individual sound in this test. However, I could have made it better, by making them more dynamic, maybe using more than one clone per sound. I could have also put interesting textures and lights on them - but it wouldn't work.

My Song

In order to separate a track into the instrument components, so I can make each instrument be effected differently, I decided to make my own song in Garageband. I just used the loops it came with, and recorded a few riffs on my guitar. This made it easier for me to play around with the settings in the sound effector. 
The song is nothing to be proud of, it was just so I could play around in C4D. This is what I came up with:

Cylinder Effector

I tried another version of the sound effector, using the 'spline tool' to create a circular set of shapes.

Frequency test

I wanted to see if I could get different shapes to do different things to the same piece of music.. I had a play around with the frequency filter - you can choose which frequencies and bandwidth you want the shape to be effected by:

The only problem with this filter, is that the frequencies of different instruments overlap, so I wouldn't be able to get each shape to visualise the sounds of each instrument..
I chose a dark blue sphere for the bass notes, such as the bass drum and guitar - I then selected the lowest frequencies with the filter.
I chose a cube for the higher drum notes (the 'clapping') such as the snare - and chose a different set of frequencies for this.
I then tried to get the piano part to be effected differently - I chose a pyramid for this. Unfortunately, the frequencies for this part aren't different, so it does pretty much the same thing as the cube..

Here is my frequency test: