Still, we all respond to things differently....

I often find myself most moved by abstract forms. Thomas, the Mandelbrot example was a good one, as an example of something abstract and very powerful... I'd consider mandelbrot zooms/explorations to be a very human thing, though. They create meanings in the same way that music does- the relationships of parts to each other and to the whole. And is music human? tone relationships are cosmic (physical/mathematical), like the mandelbrot set itself. Composition, on the other hand, is a series of decisions, much like the zoom/exploration of the fractal, and can be related to our lived experience of being in time as well as anything, in my opinion. These meanings, these abstract explorations of the human will, tend to give me the most sublime experiences (music, mostly- but also moments of abstraction in other forms... musical play).

Anyway, in short, I like the sound of your failed project, Michaël, and might enjoy playing it quite a lot more than you, even Have you considered putting the prototype online?

there's no randomness/independent decision-making by the software: everything that you see/hear is a procedural response to your actions So, while some things happen that you don't seem to cause, you are in fact causing them...

I love that!
(it feels like... life )

I think so, too! Also, I tried to play with your Zuper! singing app, but it wasn't working on my computer Sounds cool though!

Chainsawkitten: don't let a lack of music theory hold you back from programming musical interactions! About half of the toys/play-spaces in Ada just used raw frequency information, which I thought worked fine Still, if you're looking for just a tiny bit of music theory to help make pitches sound nice (harmonize) with one another, this could be useful for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale ... it seems to be a popular choice in most playful music software I've run into: basically all of the notes "work" with one another...

Michael: Ada is, indeed, a bit buggy, on account of the hacked together SuperCollider audio engine we used. I'm currently looking into options for less buggy real-time synthesis that I can use for future projects...

I'm glad you liked the one you said you did-- I quite liked it myself, though it hasn't been as popular with most other players. Still, there's something about it that may yet change your opinion on the matter-- there's no randomness/independent decision-making by the software: everything that you see/hear is a procedural response to your actions So, while some things happen that you don't seem to cause, you are in fact causing them...

I am very interested in this distinction that you mention between "interaction between software and player" and "instrument controlled by player"; I think that, specifically with the piece you mentioned (but also with the others), I am trying to explore the ways in which these two ideas intersect and become indistinguishable from one another...

Jordan: I agree about more needing to be done with sound and software... I'll try to keep doing more myself

Thanks for the kind words, both of you!

Hi,

My name is David Kanaga; I'm a musician and a beginner/amateur interaction designer/programmer. I'm really excited to have found this site (via edclef, whose project I'm working on), being a fan of notgames (specifically those with some musical component) myself.

Anyway, here's some applicable things I've done:

Website: http://www.davidkanaga.com (updated less regularly)
Music Blog: http://davidkanaga.blogspot.com (updated more regularly)

All of my music is released under a cc-by-nc-sa license, so if think it's appropriate, feel free to use it in any projects that use that same license

Undergraduate Thesis, "Time Structures in Interactive Media: Videogames as Musical Objects": http://www.davidkanaga.com/miscmusic/time_structures_thesis.pdf

This is a paper that I wrote about half a year ago, exploring the idea of videogames as a kind of musical play (even without the sound!)

And, finally, the one finished nongame (or game, for that matter) that I've worked on (with Josh Bothun, minornine.com): Ada (http://www.minornine.com/ada)

It's similar in form to Electroplankton, a sort of "album" of musical play-spaces, but perhaps more fiery/mysterious at times Give it some time to start up--sometimes it takes the sound engine about a minute to load

I'd love to hear what you think of any of my projects! Looking forward to reading some threads here...