====== VE Final Project: Template Page ======


===== Overview =====
**Team members:** Vignir, Ævar, Kristleifur\\
**Team name:** Rudy Ralph Burpens (if you want)\\
**Project name:** VISUAL MUSIC LANDSCAPE EXPERIENCE ... no ... the SENSUAL LAND OF THE SOUND PEOPLE ... no ... theee ... uhh ... incus, malleus, and stapes\\
**Project tag line:** This environment lets people play with sounds as physical objects








===== Motivation / Scenario =====

It'd be pretty cool if people could make music without knowing how. Remember the STOMP fad from a few years ago? We're thinking something similar.

Users (players) can pick up or steal sounds from the environment and arrange them on mechanisms that play them back. 

This will be sort of a cross between a standard first-person computer game and the type of working environment that is used to make electronic music using a computer - a virtual environment that controls a sequencer and a sampler.

Part of the motivation is to reuse the code from programming assignment 2, but to do it in a bad-ass manner. Ha.

Playing with sounds is fun. Maybe someone will get interested or figure out how music works playing with our environment, and go on to make proper music.

A further part of the motivation is that we didn't really find anything similar. It's always fun to make new stuff.





===== Approach =====
<del>
  * How are you going to make your environment help us get to this better place?
  * What special features will it have that help you reach your goal?
  * What other seemingly useless but cool features will it have? (perhaps they're more useful than you think, give that a thought) </del> 

Users (players) can pick up or steal sounds from the environment and arrange them on mechanisms that play them back. Revolving discs, perhaps. Think radar. The placement of the sound objects on the mechanisms determines the sequence in which the sounds are played. Users can place different pitches of the same sound, and from there you’ve got the building blocks of simple melodies.

There will be a selection of percussive and melodic sounds - and even phoneme sounds to create something that sounds slightly like speech.

The placement of the mechanisms in relation to the player’s position will create the equivalent of a mix - the machine to the left will sound out of the left speaker. Machines close by will be louder.

Either users could simply pick up sounds, or sounds could be 'shot' out of the environment with a sound-stealer gun, and different pitches squeezed from the 'sampled' sound.

Applying sound effects or filters to sound is also fun - and hence popular. Having the effects represented as physical objects would be very inviting to players - for example, an echo effect being controlled from a sort of radar-disc like deflector, whose orientation and distance from the playback machine controls the effect itself.

An online version of this environment would be pretty fun too.



===== Prototype =====
<del>
  * If you don't get to implement the whole system as you imagine it, what will your prototype at least be capable. 
  * This is where you control expectations.
</del>
The prototype would be one of this radar-disc like mechanisms that plays back the sounds from the objects placed upon it, and a source of sounds to put on the table. The sounds will be able to have different pitches.

===== Independent Study (Only Graduate Students) =====

  * What do you intend to learn about?
  * How do you plan to integrate that into the final project?


===== References / Links =====

  * Useful links or references to related work.