Goal: Code an interactive screen that reacts to sound.

Why I chose this design…

This assignment was called “talking heads”. We were tasked with designing a head only using Processing. This means not only did we have to connect it to our laptop microphones but also code all of the shapes that make up the face. The idea was that the quieter a sound was the less of a reaction the would be, and the louder the more exaggerated.

For my face design, I came up with 25 thumbnails of different designs before landing on this one. I decided on this one because it looks a lot like the faces I used to paint.

Originally I had it just look like its singing or yelling by making the eyes and eyebrows go higher with the sound and the mouth bigger. But, I ended up deciding that was boring so I added a little face in the mouth once it hit a certain level of loudness.

Final outcome…

For my final I did my best to add enough variation across the face so even if you couldn’t hear the sound it was reacting to you should still be able to get an idea of whether is it loud or quiet. I am also happy with the way the expressions turned out.

Overall I am happy with the outcome. Since this was one of my first projects I felt I had a ton of creative freedom with, I paid extra attention to the details of the face. I do feel I could have done a better job stabilizing the sound so it wasn’t as shaky. But in the end, I liked the design and it did what it had to do and made a great addition to the sing-off we had with these in class (we played a song from YouTube and put all of our project up and they all sang together).