Day 13: Shapes and Gestures
Today’s prompt: “Ping”
Day 12: Shapes and Gestures
Today’s shape is “Out and Back.” I think I’m just starting to scratch the surface of this shape, so I may do more later this week.
I’m also hitting an interesting moment in this project. I’m running out of ideas. But that’s a good thing. It’s when the hard work begins and the good stuff starts happening. It’s one of the reasons I was excited to do this for 100 days - I knew I would hit a wall after 2 or 3 weeks and I would need to get outside my comfort zone. Get ready for messy work!
Day 11: Shapes and Gestures
We’re back after a week away from the internet! This week we’re going to play around with shapes and gestures. How many different ways can we make a sound that goes up, down, back and forth, towards, away, etc…? Can we make them organically? Can we make them through synthesis?
These kinds of gestural ideas can sound meaningless in isolation, but when you are creating a system or a language for a device to communicate with a human the difference between, say, Up or Down can be very meaningful. It could indicate Send vs. Receive, Approve vs. Reject, Happy vs. Angry, Error vs. Resolve…it all happens in shapes and gestures.
Day 10: Structure Exploration
Today I set out to make short but texturally interesting sounds. Obviously you can go much shorter than these, and should go much shorter than these when you are doing something purely functional or something that will repeat frequently. But how much sonic interest can you fit into something that’s a quarter of a second long?
Day 9: Structure Exploration
For today I set out trying to create sounds that built up, like a riser or power-up. But in the process I stumbled into some cool effects with stutter edits. I decided to explore what I could do with that technique. Is this a structure exploration? Probably not, but sometimes you just have to follow an idea to its conclusion.
Day 8: Structure Exploration
Today’s UI sounds were all made using one short source sound combined with lots of echo effects. My intention was to explore a “Hit -> Ring out” kind of structure but in the process I also ended up stumbling across some unexpectedly long sounds with very cool harmonic effects. Happy accidents!
Day 7: Structure Exploration
Further adventures in longer sounds with an arc to them. I’m much happier with these than with yesterday’s sounds. I think the improvement comes from embracing musical elements more fully.
Day 6: Structure Exploration
For this week I’m going to explore some different structures and shapes for the UI sounds I’m making. What can I make when the constraint is not what source material I use but rather what shape the gesture takes? This first set is a few different explorations of longer sounds. Usually in UI sound design you want to get out of the way quickly, especially with sounds that the user is going to hear a lot. But there are always exceptions.
While I like this set of sounds, I don’t think they’re completely successful and I’m going to experiment with making another set of longer sounds tomorrow.
Day 5: Source Material Exploration
Building a simple chatbot UI system from an arpeggiated synth (Plugin Alliance’s excellent-sounding Knifonium emulation). I sometimes wonder whether harmonic or melodic gestures that “say something” to me will be interpreted the same way by another person. These sounds are meant to be functional, after all, so it would be problematic if a melody that sounds like “Hello” to me sounds like “Goodbye” to you.
Day 4: Source Material Exploration
More water sounds today. These ones are built from splatters and sprinkles. One nice thing about doing this challenge is that it helps me recognize my own habits and patterns. After finishing this set I realized how readily I make sounds with an A-B structure; an impact and a splatter, a ramp up into a ping, a rise and a fall. Maybe after this week of exploring different source materials, I can play with structure next week.