Oh my days. First off, I will set up my CCRMA website this weekend. I promise to migrate everything over to its respective folders!

Working on this milestone was fun, but I’m realizing that I need to write my code more efficiently. Right now, I feel like I’m playing in a sandbox without much consideration for how runnable this is, or even knowing how to play. I’m writing very messy code, trying to get the visuals right with random math, instantiating GSphere after GLines after FlatMaterial because I have no idea what the most efficient way is. I get a billion warning lines per second because of something inefficient I’m doing, and my audio visualizer is definitely suffering from it. I think I haven’t focused much on the audio side of ChucK, since I still don’t know how to connect audio buffers, microphone input, all those things.. (yes, I did it for this milestone but I don’t have a solid grasp of it) Gosh, I didn’t even know how to get crisp audio screen recordings on my Mac. I’ll need to research or ask next time, because my video and audio quality is so bad.

It was interesting to see how this assignment made me viscerally feel that computer graphics is math. I’m now just working with the basics to try to get the visuals I want, like the slight waves of the will-o-wisps, their color gradation, the weighting of the waveform trees, the shape of the GLines will-o-wisp — breaking it down in terms of x and y coordinates. I want to do more complex things, but I guess this is a building block toward that. I’m still juggling learning how to make what I want and also going back and cleaning up the things I have written. Because there are visual results, technically, everything I’m doing is fun. But it becomes a bit mind-numbing when I work on it for hours straight while I’m sick. I usually love writing too, but maybe I’ll work on this again when I feel better. I need to go to Office Hours to try to optimize my audio visualizer because I have so much more I want to doooooo!