For my Interactive Touch project, I decided to explore the ways with which we communicate with each other. To do so, I create an electric lyre with the Makey Makey and conductive string to play different tones. As the participant plays the instrument, a Unity application slowly reveals a poem to the user while animating the words with color and opacity changes. The poem itself is based off of random things that my roommates and friends have said, and I created strange and interesting metaphors out of them.
Here is the poem in question…
Sounds from the Red House
Zebra patterns overlaying the glowing eyes of paper and pestilence.
The watch-maker’s nephew kills the pastor in Diablo’s garb, hidden beside the fountain.
And all the while, the pathetic notes rage against the light of normalcy.
In the graces of ink spawn, I write with the snails and frogs of ancient creeks.
I’m saddened by the grief of a thousand moons, belting their sorrows to the heavens and collecting their tears.
Saltwater seas toss and turn, shoving moss and life into void and death.
The allotment sings to us, electric, electric lighting flashing never more.
We toast to red queens and black kings, yet a flimsy house supports no commoners nor nobles.
Each moment fractured into instances of time, a subset of pause, as the reality among us is but a facsimile.
The truth is not truth to me and all but lies to you.
The music dies a slow death, with one ballad left to whisper the children to their slumber.
And all the artists laugh in their ecstasy and their misery.
This piece was a very nice piece, which spawned from such an interesting concept of critical importance to pretty much anyone in the world. Using the medium of music further establishes how much this relates to the concept of a bard. As a neutral question, were all of the notes bound to a string in the order of a scale? I had noticed while you played it that one particularly high note would frequently play even when it didn’t match the musical scaling. I personally find this a solid and fun use of the MakeyMakey medium.
The playing cards leave a bold and eyecatching first impression! Which makes the harmonious sounds stand out even more almost giving a contrast for being so light and airy. The metaphors also spark curiosity as I tried to decrypt their meanings. A question I have is: Did you individually record the sound of guitar chords?
The opinion I have is to match the poem projected on the screen to the playing cards used in a color-coordinated sense to give a pop-for example, making the font color blue, black, or red like the hearts and diamonds.
Interacting with this one is great – the aesthetic and interactive experience is on point. The words made me visualize a lot as well. One question I have is about the sounds. Why did you choose the ones you did versus other stringed instruments?
I think the piece looks very neat and I like the minimalistic aesthetic for the short poems. And the best part in my opinion of this piece is when you actually read the poem along with it playing. The whole performace just feel very harmonic and almost mesmerizing to me. A question from me is: do you plan to add more animations to the poem?
I love the simplicity of the poetry on the screen that makes it super readable, and it looks really nice how it fades in. I have a permissioned opinion — I think incorporating the colors of the cards (red/blue) into the text may help with the cohesiveness of the piece. 🙂
I really appreciate the poetry, I had a great time reading it and interpreting the words. I agree that changing the color of the text would contribute well to the piece! Overall I thought this concept was super fascinating and I can tell you put a lot of your own personal art styles into it.
As a neutral observation: It stands out to me that your project was the only one with a clear performative component. You didn’t just create the instrument: You played and sang for your demonstration. Your description suggests that this was designed with the idea that the user would play the instrument (that was the assignment after all) but I think it’s notable that your project gets its ideas across even without direct user interaction.
Making a whole instrument for this project is impressive. I enjoyed reading all the fun and quirky poems. Something that would be interesting to see would perhaps be some images or small animations to go with the part of the poem.
Nice use case for Unity and the extra pins on the MakeyMakey! I’ll still prefer electric wires instead of conductive tapes as your conductor on your non-touched parts.