Midishape - an Ensemble Composition Tool For my final project in Interactive Computer Graphics (CIV 301), I created a visual composition tool. The user attaches musical motifs to shapes in a scene. Then by modifying the scene - moving shapes around, resing them, adding new shapes, changing colors, etc one changes the underlying music. Below the sample image from the application I have included slide notes from my project presentation.

Fascination of Combining Colors and Music:

Newton's 7-color spectrum
Disco lights
Disneys's Fantasia

My Approach:

We can modify how pieces of music (motifs) sound by changing:

key (pitch)
instrument playing
volume
tempo
order of notes

There are transformations we can apply to shapes:

scale
transpose (x, y, z direction)
change color
modify transparency

Difficult Question - What Gets Mapped to What?

Try it out and see/hear !

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Perry Cook, Alain Kornhauser, Tim Milliron.