Vream Team

Team Lead:

Emily Van Belleghem, 408 859 5845

Location:

Floor two, left side Vive room

Vertcal Category:

Entertainment, storytelling

Inspiration

This project was inspired by synesthesia. As artists we wanted to try and blend the senses to experience more of the world we live in; in this case, to see sound. It was also inspired by our team leaders experiences with composition. There are many people who would love to write music, and have a terrific sense of melody, but don't have any way to write it down. This is because music has an incredible amount of syntax, and requires years of training to completely understand. This application was intended to put the power of music in the hands of people who would like to explore a virtual world where it might be a bit easier to experiment with sound. It immerses the user in their work in an interactive and simple atmosphere while also creating incredible musical sculptures.

What it does

The user can compose, listen to, and visualize their own music through a wholly new abstract vision. Basically the user can draw music with their hands and watch it play before their very eyes. The notes light up in the color of their pitch, where pitch varies on the vertical axis. So the user can better see how notes might relate to each other the way colors and relative space does. There are several different instruments to choose and test with, and the user can draw with both hands if they would like.

How we built it

The five of us collaborated on music, design and unity development to produce this experience. It took many hours but in the end were very proud of our work and the abilities this VR project brings forth.

Challenges we ran into

Finding an impressive way to visualize our physical music system is difficult. We spent much of the first day prototyping and testing different aesthetics in search of one that fit our vision. As you could imagine rethinking music in a 3D space is very difficult has many different options, we needed something simple, intuitive and fun.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Were proud of the notes lighting up in the correct color when they're hit . It really brings motion to our artistic piece and gives the user a much better sense of timing. We're also very proud of our intuitive UI. We feel it was extremely different traditional music composition and it gave user lots of freedom. We also tested it with composor's outside our group to see their thoughts, and they felt it would greatly enhance understanding of music theory. We're proud we have a new way to experience music and how different it is than the user might expect.

What we learned

We learned that key really matters. #HarmonyIsKey. Zach learned a lot about shaders, I learned a lot about how the Vive's controls. Our group was one of many people with very different backgrounds, and we we're to take input from everyone and blend ideas. We also learned that this project has a lot of potential to go deep into music theory into many different abstract ways.

What's next for Vream Team

There's a lot of ways we intend to take this project. In general we would love to keep exploring the relations of space and visualizing music. Hopefully we could add different effects to the music such as distortion, reverb etc. Better visuals and animations would also be amazing to truly create a performance of art. We also would like to add an editing feature to change the music already written. We'd also like to pause music, change volume of music, give better control on the looping aspect. Vream Team definitely proved a proof of concept that could go very far in terms of VR application.

Built With

• c#
• unity