This project had great plans as soon as the topic of sound was discovered. My head was exploding from different types of ideas that we could do. We started off with brainstorming about 2 weeks before the website was finished. Our idea was to create an interactive piece where the user enters a sound and this sound is added to a song and the website creates a one-word song back to the user. We both were happy with the idea and we started to create it.
Sarah helped us get a SSL certificate for the domen to allow record and store sound. With that out of the way we started to implement the user input. That was done within less than an hour, because it was simple. The next step was to figure out how to change the pitch of the entered sound. I thought that would be very simple and straightforward. Never was I so wrong and naive. Apparently it is almost impossible to modify a pitch of a sound entered in the browser. It took me more than 6 hours of searching how to shift the pitch. We gave up on that. Pitch shift was the main part of the project, since the one-word song can’t really be played with the same pitch. Our next idea was to create pre-recorded songs that have a repeated phrase. This turned out to be fast and done in less than an hour as well. The difficult part was the song choice. Deena was working on the design of the website while I was doing the code aspect of the project.
The website really doesn’t match the first expectations, but it completely matches the second expectations. The takeaway from this project is never underestimate the easy aspects of the work.