Let's Dance!

Ideation boards:

To dance or not to dance? That is the question.

Composing music is difficult on it's own, so how do you create an experience that is accessible and relatively easy to learn?

The answer: Scaffolding.

The Music

Choose a song and break it up into it's separate musical tracks. Drums, bass, guitar, sax, synth... whatever it may be. Assign an order of importance to the tracks. i.e., user number one will be assigned the rhythm, user number two, bass, etc.

The Experience

Press play.

A simple rhythm tracks starts to play (audible)

All of the other tracks start to play as well (inaudible)

One person starts to dance.

The main rhythm track increases to an audible volume.

All of the other tracks continue to play inaudibly.

A second person starts to dance.

The baseline kicks in.

All of the other tracks continue to play inaudibly

And so on, until the entire set of tracks is being heard... As long as you are dancing your track can be heard. And the harder you dance, the louder your track becomes.

The Code

Has the user pressed play? If yes, start all tracks w/ track 1 volume set to 100 and the rest set to 0.

Wait.

Are users dancing? If yes, how many? and in what order did they start to dance?

Assign the first user that dances to track two. Vary track two volume level between 50 and 100 based on the energy level of her dancing. If she stops dancing for more than 20 seconds, slowly fade the volume back to zero.

Assign the second user that dances to track three. Vary track three volume level between 50 and 100 based on the energy level of her dancing. If she stops dancing for more than 20 seconds, slowly fade the volume back to zero.

etc.

The Sensors

Time to experiment.

First with 3-Axis Accelerometers.

Then with Tilt sensors.

Ideas moving forward

Instead of playing all tracks at once, when a user hits play, what if the tracks started separately, as they would in the actual song? As if the dancer is indeed the musician, controlling when his instrument comes in? We would have to code such that tracks can only start at the beginning of a measure.

Happy Making !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!