My first prototype for my visual music project was meant to show how I envisioned some of the base ideas for my final. Because of my limited knowledge in After Effects, I was not able to do anything spectacular or note worthy. I played a chromatic scale (notes ascending by half step, and descending by half step) with colored rectangles mapped to where I thought the notes might appear. After looking it over enough of times, I knew there were a lot of problems with it and the feedback I got complemented my thoughts.
My first criticism is that the colors should be: low = dark and high = light. I even tried to do this with the octaves of certain notes. For example, C4 was red and C5 was a lighter shade of red. However, I did not consider that the other notes in the scale would need to follow this rule as well. My original color scheme was the following:
C – red
C# – red orange
D – orange
D# – yellow orange
E – yellow
F – lime green
F# – green
G – green blue
G# – blue
A – indigo
A# – purple
B – pink
While it made most sense to work with a rainbow at first, it does not agree with my idea. For example, blue and purple are darker than yellow, even though they occur higher in the scale. In future iterations, I’m going to fix the color scheme so that the colors correspond with low and high notes.
Another criticism I received was the usage of the canvas. The way it is mapped currently, all notes would only occur on a rectangle and nowhere else in the entire canvas. Someone suggested that I use the height of the canvas for pitch and the width for time. Ideally, no shapes or colors would go backwards on the canvas like the demo showed. The notes would move along the canvas as though it were a timeline.
I received an interesting suggestion for the accessibility to the project. This particular concern dealt with color blindness and how I might cater to that. Unfortunately, I am not well informed on color blindness and the spectrum of color blindness, but in the final project I can choose different shapes to represent the notes, rather than colors. I wouldn’t replace the colors entirely, I might just make it a separate option for people to choose. I imagine something similar to sites that allow the option to toggle for color blindness.