Multimedia Music

Mulitmedia Music was developed in response to a series of design exercises for the class Multimedia Production I during my first quarter in the IDT program. I used each new design exercise as an excuse to continued to augment the Multimedia Music project.

From the start, I had choosen to create a complete multimedia piece whose purpose it would be to teach other multimedia students about digital music and sound. The content for the project drew from my own previous experience with digital audio. The resulting application was then used to help present this information to the rest of the class.

A custom design grid was created to guide the graphical layout throughout the project. On top of that grid was created a set of enticing graphics that provide the bulk of the user interface. While simple in design, the interface provides all of the desired functionality within a shell that is both attractive and intuitive.

Within each of the four sections of the project, background music plays which is exemplary of the types of audio being discussed. For example, the music that plays within the "CD-Audio" section is, in fact, digital audio that has been sampled from CD at 44.1Khz, 16-bits. Likewise, the music played within the "Trackers" and "Midi" sections are digital recordings of tracker and MIDI output, respectively.

Custom audio scripts were created for this project to handle automatic looping of the audio samples within each section, as well as smooth fading in and out of audio samples as sections are traversed.

Note: A special "easter egg" was embedded in the project just before completion to help demonstrate the difficulty of matching lengthy animation with sound from within standard authoring environments such as SuperCard. The demonstration is triggered by clicking the red stone-like sphere on the end of the treble cleff twice, holding the mouse button for just over two seconds on the second click.