A3: abstract sonic artwork

In this assignment you will create an abstract interactive artwork focussed on sound.

The goal of this assignment is to create an interactive sound artwork with an abstract visual component. Your work should be engaging, coherent, and use interaction to enhance experience. The sound and visuals should work together coherently and invite a viewer to engage in the work. The interaction in your work engage the viewer in exploration, and set up a feedback loop between viewer and artwork. You should represent a deepening of the experience by allowing viewers to open new scenes or significant transformations of the work through interaction.

This assignment is a significant departure from the first two which were about representational art, and did not include sound. You’ll have to think carefully about the lectures and work you have completed in labs which have helped prepare you for this point. Creating an abstract work can seem difficult, but it can also be freeing compared to creating detailed and realistic drawings of characters or objects.

Outline

• Due: 01 October 2024, 9:00 pm
• Assignment template: available on GitLab (link)
• Specification: keep reading 🙂
• Weighting: 20%
• Marked out of: _ / 20
• Submission: submit your assignment through Gitlab (full instructions below)
• Policies: no late submissions accepted; this is an individual assessment
• Rubric: Please see the relevant assessment task on the class summary for your course:
  • COMP1720
  • COMP6720

Requirements

Your submission must:

• be abstract: it should use forms, colours, lines, and sounds that are not intended to reference or represent the real world, it should not use characters or representations or real objects
• be a sound artwork: your artwork should have a significant sonic component including both synthesised and sampled sounds using p5.sound
• be interactive: the viewer should be able to interact with the artwork using the keyboard and mouse
• be engaging and coherent: use what you know about drawing and interaction in p5 to make your submission an artwork that grabs the viewer’s attention and demands exploration
• use interaction to enhance experience: this means that interacting with your work reveals aspects that are not available without interaction, and that deeper interaction leads to more engaging experiences
• be a p5.js sketch that takes the whole browser window
  • i.e.: createCanvas(windowWidth, windowHeight)
• use fractions of width and height for drawing and interaction
• include a thumbnail.png file (a static image of your submission)
• include the code in the usual sketch.js file
• include an artist statement (max 200 words) describing your artwork (see below)
• include a references.md file with at least two external references and any self references (see box below)
  • these can be from classmates, artworks, books, online sources, any reference is fine as long as there are two (or more) of them.

Because this assignment is allowing you include external assets which you may have made yourself, we need you to be clear about this and include entries in your references.md file for all assets that you use, including ones that you have made yourself (make sure you state that you are the source for assets created by you). This is so that there is no confusion when it comes time to mark on whether the asset was sourced externally, or if you have created it yourself.

And a few “must nots”:

• must not include image files unless you have created them yourself (e.g., with a camera or digital art software), or they come from unsplash.com
• must not include sound files unless you have created them yourself (e.g., with the record function on your phone), or they come from freesound.org
• must not be a game: the specification is for an interactive artwork, not an “art-themed game”. If your artwork involves a “score” or a concept of winning or losing, you may actually be making a game.
• must include references for any image or sound files that you include (even if you created them yourself).

The artist statement

Your submission must include a short (max 200 words) artist statement. This is a short document, written in the first person, which explains:

• What your interactive artwork is.
• How interaction enhances the viewer’s experience.

The artist statement is your chance to explain how interaction enhances the viewer’s experience in your submission—don’t assume that we can guess.

You won’t receive a separate mark for the artist statement. It is considered as part of your whole submission. The artist statement is used to help evaluate your ability to design and construct an interactive artwork in line with the assignment specification.

Getting started

Here’s the process for working on the assignment:

1. fork & clone the assignment repo

2. add whatever code you like to make a cool/interesting submission

3. when you run the sketch, hitting spacebar will save a still image of the sketch (as a thumbnail.png file in your Downloads folder)

4. when you’re happy with your thumbnail.png, copy it into your assignment folder (this will overwrite the previous version) and commit the new version to the repo (and push it up to the GitLab server)

If you’re new to Git and you’d like a helping hand, there are some git help videos (from 2018, but still pretty spot-on) on the resources page.

Submission process

1. fork the assignment template repository from the Gitlab server

2. clone¹ & work on your fork of the assignment 1 repo, regularly committing & pushing your changes to the GitLab server

3. at the submission deadline, the latest commit² pushed to the GitLab server (not on your local machine!) will count as your submission

One thing to note is that there are some “checks” which the GitLab server runs to help you out. So if you get a pipeline failed email, then have a look at the FAQ.

Submission checklist

1. my project satisfies the requirements

2. my completed assignment has been pushed to the GitLab server, and all the required files (your versions of artist-statement.md, references.md, thumbnail.png and sketch.js) have made it to the server

3. my references.md file includes at least two external references, as well as references for external files that I have created, and everything not mentioned in there is my own work

4. i have viewed and tested my submission on the test URL and it displays / works correctly

FAQ

Canvas Size and Reactive Design

As we are getting later in the course, we are expecting a higher level of sophistication with your submissions. As such this assignment uses createCanvas(windowWidth, windowHeight) instead of a fixed width and height value.

This means that you will need to be using width and height to calculate positions and make sure your submission looks great regardless of where it is being viewed, whether that is a phone, an old CRT monitor or a laptop.

This means that your submission should still look great even if the aspect ratio changes, eg: (vertical, square, widescreen)

Can I use images or sounds from the internet?

You may only use images or sounds that you create yourself (preferred) or if they come from unsplash.com or freesound.org.

All image and sound files must be cited in your references.md regardless of whether you created them or not.

Can I use insert advanced p5 feature here?

Yes, as long as it doesn’t involve using images (see above). We may not be able to help with some advanced p5 and JavaScript that isn’t included in the course so far.

How do I submit my references & artist statement?

The template repo contains “starter” files for both of these. You should change these files to put your own content in there, and commit & push the files up with the rest of your submission.

Basically, everything you need to submit is in that Git repository—as long as you make the changes in there, commit them and push them up to the GitLab server then you’re all good.