Interactive
Music Studio
(go down to it)
Welcome to my musical interactive Flash
experiment--a "work-in-progress" first developed in October 1999. My purpose
was to investigate some of the advanced interactive techniques that Flash 4
is capable of, especially regarding audio. This example contains 7 separate mini-Flash movies--one for each
of the six mixer channels and one for the keyboard.
You'll need the Flash
4 player to try this out.
Instructions:
To operate the mixer: Click on different
vertical areas of the volume slider controls (at the bottom of each mixer strip
graphic) to set a volume for each pre-recorded channel of music (you'll find
that there are only four volume choices for each channel). The music loops of
the tracks are, from left to right:
drums & bass; saxes; organ chords; lead fuzz riff; hand percussion; electro-swirl
The pan controls, directly above the slider
controls, can be adjusted to pan each channel hard left, center or hard right
in the stereo sound image. Click on either side of these knobs or in the top
center to turn them accordingly. The other knobs displayed on the mixer graphic
are not functional at this time.
You'll
notice that each time you set a channel volume level or pan control, the loop
for that channel resets itself to play from the beginning. To get the
loops to match up rhythmically, you'll need to click on the controls just a
little bit before a downbeat (the feeling for this will come after a few
tries). This is due to the need for separate wave files for every setting of
each music loop, as I have not yet discovered a fool-proof way in Flash's
programming to change the attributes of sound waves as they are playing.
To play the keyboard: First, click anywhere on the keyboard image to make sure its "movie is active".
Simply moving the cursor over the black and white keys will play them (only
certain notes are selected, so no matter what you play, it's always in a Gm7
scale and will fit harmonically with all of the music loops.) Click on a particular
key to make that note sound louder. You can also play notes using the computer
keyboard--the middle row of letters (A through ") and a few of the top row letters.
Experiment to see what matches with what.
To change the sound of the keyboard: Click
on either the left or center button of the three under the green display (the
right one isn't programmed to work yet). The display will show you what sound
you've selected. These are the only active functions available on the keyboard
graphic at this time.
The musical loops and samples were created and recorded by myself (using a Korg keyboard) and are based on a composition entitled "A Convoluted Breach" by my musical project "Cognitive Dissonance" (this link leads to available samples of the group's music). The graphics for this site began as scanned images, and were heavily manipulated in Photoshop for use here (yes, I still need to label things on them). If you have any comments or questions as to how this was done, e-mail me at [email protected]. Thanks for looking.
Click here to line up the studio properly on your display.