Video Demo

Sound Composition

Both sound and visual design were built around the main idea of our project — a horror-esque live coding performance. It was definitely unconventional for live coding performances, but for some reason the idea stuck as our group was super excited about audience reactions moreso than the performance itself.

We borrowed many sound elements from horror movie soundtracks — ambient noises, ominous drums, and banging doors. The performance starts with some ambient noise (‘ab’ sound played with a tweaked class example), thumping sounds (jvbass) and crows (crows) chirping at the background. We transition to a few different main ‘melodies’, a haunting vibraphone sound (supervibe), footsteps (a custom sample) and a few other sound samples that sounded unnerving to us.

The buildup happens through the ‘footsteps’ custom sample we have. We speed up the footsteps as we fade out the sound elements to make it sound like someone is running away from something. At it’s peak, we transition to the jumpscare, before fading to a scene thats reminiscent of TV static. The sound for the TV static scene is our interpretation of TV white noise through TidalCycles, and we made good use of the long sample examples that were provided to us in class.
d2 $ jux rev $ slow 8 $ striateBy 32 (1/4) $ s "sheffield" #begin 0.1 # end 0.3 # lpf 12000 # room 0.2 # cut 1;

Visual Composition

The visuals are based off an image of a hallway with a door at the end. The main idea behind it was to zoom in towards the door as the jumpscare approaches. We intensified the image with Hydra by adding dark spots, saturating the image, and creating a flickering effect as the performance progressed. At the end, we end with a shot of a zoomed in door before transitioning to the jumpscare.

Getting the jumpscare video to work ( please don’t visit the video.src unprepared ) took us a surprising amount of time, as we were struggling to find a place to upload the video. Uploading the video on Google Drive didn’t seem to work because of some CORs errors, and uploading to YouTube didn’t work either. We finally found a host that worked which was imgur.

var video = document.createElement('video');
video.loop = false video.crossOrigin = "anonymous";
video.autoplay = true;
video.src = 'https://i.imgur.com/uFj91DQ.mp4';
video.oncanplaythrough = function() {
s0.init({ src: video, dynamic: true });
src(s0).out()
}

After the jumpscare, we transition to TV static which reminded us of what you might see after being caught by a monster in a video game or what you would see on TV.

Work Division

Jun and Aadhar primarily worked on TidalCycles while Maya worked on Hydra, which was the same arrangement we had as the first drum circle project last week. However, we found ourselves giving a lot more feedback to each other on each part of the project instead of isolating our parts we were working on, and we think that helped create a more cohesive project. A big part of our project was repeatedly practicing and coordinating our synchronous changes for the jumpscare, as TidalCycles needed to trigger the jumpscare sound while in Hydra you would need to trigger the jumpscare video which needed to happen at the same time for the performance to feel coherent. We decided to use the ‘scale’ of Hydra as an internal indicator among ourselves to signal when we needed to get ready to trigger the jumpscare. When the scale of the room reaches [32], both parts of the performance would trigger the jumpscare sequence.