Investigating and Prototyping

The team has been pushing forward with more setup and confidence-building with tech during the past few days. We plan to have basic functional components to show for quarters next week before we begin integrating everything together into a single plan of design / execution.

Design

The team had a big design meeting this week to help solidify our direction as we head in to quarter-semester presentations next week. With the help of this meeting we outlined an ideal experience that we want users to have. However, there are of course decisions that can’t yet be made until we test with the tech, and we have been working hard to get to that point. Continue reading →

This week, the team finalized branding and began laying down the foundations for the project.  The programmers are in a comfortable place in terms of knowing what can be achieved this semester and we are preparing to finalize our design around the tech’s capabilities.

In terms of branding, our color scheme, poster, half-sheet, and general branding elements have all been finalized.   Moreover, if you remember our old logo, the G-Clef was on the wrong line of the staff, and that has been fixed.  The team cares about music and it is important that we know that it is important to show that in all the things we create. Continue reading →

This week, Bravura began reviewing our various design ideas. We presented to our client, spoke with Roger Powell, began investigating tech, and have also begun work on team branding.

Having spent our first week researching and brainstorming, on Tuesday, we presented various design proposals to our client and advisor, Jiyoung Lee. The team pitched 4 ideas: 1. a simplified digital audio workstation, which used voice as input; 2. a mechanical bouncing ball contraption that was a physical analogue to sheet music; 3. a line-drawer that would be translated to a pitch graph; 4. a node-based tool that combined distinct visual shapes with pathing. Jiyoung expressed her preferences for ideas #1 and #3, particularly the features of voice input, the ability to arrange samples, the ability to generate accompaniment, and a function to output and share the final product. After speaking with Jiyoung, the team compiled a more detailed feature list to investigate as we move forward in determining the final design. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →