Design & Art
On the Design side of development, our main focus this week was preparing documentation to send out to audio developer forums. Since EQ is our final prototype for the semester, there isn’t much to do on the development side now that tech has finished implementing it. One small design change we had throughout the week was a visual change for our “bright” representation in our simple EQ representation. The initial one is shown below:
We got feedback from our advisors that a sun might not elicit the “bright” change that we are making with our music. The sun’s reddish appearance and unanimous connection to heat make it a better candidate for representing a “warm” sound, which is a very different EQ setting than brightness. We decided to change the sun representation to a more abstract star object, shown below:
Diving into the documentation side, we are currently reviewing all of the previous prototype documentation to prepare to send it out to the community. We also have been documenting the pain points that each prototype was inspired by, and how we attempted to alleviate said pain with our project.
Tech
This week we started by implementing the design mentioned above for both the Simple EQ and the 3-Band EQ.
Sam came up with this cool way of showing addition of brightness and dullness to the particular track in terms of adjusting the filters in the frequency domain of the audio.
The other main realization from the audio part of it was that, it made sense for us to switch from a linear to a logarithmic scale on the y-axis and we got reminded of this when we went back to using the EQ plugin on a regular DAW. The resolution that we get for the lower and mid frequency bands is much higher than when the scale is linear. Because of this change, we had to change a few things here and there in the code to support the logarithmic scale system of frequencies.
We finished up the prototype by polishing the visuals, adding a new songs for this prototype and implementing both the Simple and 3 Band EQ interactions and packaging all of this together in the same build. Off to playtesting!