Over the last week, I’ve put my focus into these two individual projects, while hoping to contribute in an efficient way to my group project next week (clinq.tv).
HearMirror has been in true conception stage for some time. It started with wanting to dump my brain out for added insight and communication improvement. It evolved into a project about voice recording and analysis as a method for getting at the content and abstract qualities from stream of thought with minimal conscious intention. Macspeech Dictate is a piece of software which I may implement for content, but this is unlikely, since the abstract aim seems to be more interesting. For digging into the abstract, I’ve spent a lot of time looking for off-the-shelf software applications focused on voice analysis, tinkered with the Minim library in Processing, and perhaps will ultimately write a script to utilize Praat, “a free scientific computer software program for the analysis of speech in phonetics. It has been designed and continuously developed by Paul Boersma and David Weenink of the University of Amsterdam.” This tool is useful in that it can record input or analyze existing files. The output can be numeric and visual, and there are lots of functions that I don’t even understand at this point. I’ve spent lots of time today trying to better comprehend the physics of sound and the ties between it and happiness, which in tern has led me through a flow of reading, video watching, and self-test taking… I should set a rigid plan if I’m to get this thing accomplished, and I need to submit some ideas for my Thesis project and the Winter Show. Ahhh, breathe.
Bubble-UP is coming along, but implementing all the features I want, while paying attention to time-consuming aesthetic details, and getting any kind of useful gameplay right are a bit overwhelming. Time is beginning to get away, but thinking bigger picture about “later” as only we humans do according Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness, which I just started, has taken over my mind recently, which might be good or bad, but yea… I don’t really know. Sleep.