Progress
This week the team made a lot of tangible progress to move forward with the project. After last week's lab period, Jeremy and Albert met with the team mentor, Joseph to try and diagnose the issues that were preventing our project from progressing. As stated on the blog over the last few weeks, there have been several difficulties and challenges that have inhibited us from moving forward. The primary issue has been merely technical--we have not been able to successfully connect the MIDI controller to the necessary computer software. Initially, the group couldn't get the MIDI controller to connect to the DAW, and once that problem was solved, we couldn't get the audio input from the DAW to connect to the Arduino. After meeting with Joseph, although the problems weren't completely solved, Jeremy and Albert both got a better understanding for how they were going to fix the problems. Joseph hypothesized that perhaps the problem was one of compatibility and suggested to try the project on a Windows computer as opposed to Jeremy's Apple computer. Taking this advice Cassie and Jeremy met up on Wednesday night to try the Arduino on Cassie's Windows computer. After working on it for over two hours and making little to no progress, we realized that the issue might not be one of software. It was during the lab period that we had our breakthrough. After meddling with the inputs in the processing code and finding the correct ports to use, there was finally some sort of LED output. This can be seen in this short clip:Although we aren't yet at our final product, we have tackled what has so far been the most difficult obstacle: getting the MIDI controller to communicate with the microcontroller and get LED output. This is a huge step for the group and will allow us to stay on track with our original timeline.
Moving Forward
As we look ahead to what still needs to be accomplished there a few things that can be done to get the module to its final form:- Configure the colors that appear to match up with the note played.
- As of now, the colors that show up do not match up correctly with notes played. This is really the basis of the project; the inherent connections between light and sound. Fortunately, because we made so much progress this week, this configuration should not be that difficult.
- Get the MIDI controller to actually play sound.
- As we understand it, this is an issue with the DAW, Reaper. The MIDI controller itself is only meant to output audio data, not actual sound; that is the responsibility of the DAW. Over the week, Albert intends to reach out to a friend who is an Music Industry major to help with this aspect of the project.
- Code the LEDs to display varying brightness based on the octave.
- Octaves representing intensity of color would be a really nice touch to the module that would definitely augment the synesthetic effect but will only be looked at once the above two issues have been solved
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