Hello from Bravura! We are a seven person team at the CMU Entertainment Technology Center’s Silicon Valley campus, and our client is Jiyoung Lee, an ETC faculty member. This semester, our team will be working on a challenge that has fascinated us as well as Jiyoung since before we came together: We will be investigating and creating an app that can help people become comfortable with and encouraged to make music, in short, to show people that “creating music is not that difficult.”

This first week the team has gotten off to a quick start. After meeting with Jiyoung on Monday, the team quickly organized our internal roles and overall identity. Our team name, “bravura,” is Italian for “boldness”, and to play music “con bravura” is to play it in a brilliant manner. We have a strong team with a producer, art lead/associate producer, lead designer, and four programmers, and hope to show brilliant work throughout the semester.

Our first tasks were to begin brainstorming and creating potential designs for our experience, which we will be pitching at the start of next week. The team has looked at a lot of other software in this space, many of which we have posted on our blog at: http://visualizingmusic.blogspot.com/. Garageband, Sound Shapes, Visuamusio, etc. have helped both to inspire us as well as to give us a sense of the complex market space which we are trying to navigate. We’ve formulated a number of diverse ideas from musical tools to toys to very game-like experiences.

Next week, we will decide on which one of these directions to pursue, and begin refining the design in anticipation for production. There will be even more questions and even more answers that the team will need to uncover next week, and we look forward to telling you more about the direction we hope to take this semester in our next newsletter.