I'm working on a little interactive music thing tonight for the new train songs album, going to try to start & finish it this weekend. Thought I'd make a little thread and write about the process as I go. http://luscho.bandcamp.com/album/40-songs-for-a-train-ride

The basic idea is real simple: ever since the beginning of this project, I wanted to make a listening environment that simulated looking out a train window, with a simple parralax environment that responded gently but obviously to the music. You're holding a walkman, obviously.

and now that I'm releasing 40 train songs in the covid-times, this feels like an even more crucial part of the project! 40 songs for digitally-dream-projecting into a train ride

anyway, I'm writing the first lines of code right now. the goal for tonight is just to build a system that switches from song to song, ideally one that loads the files as needed to avoid asking your browser to load up 40 mp3s all at once

btw please recommend good train music to listen to while I work :)

Ok, last night I got the music-switching MOSTLY working (there's some weird crosstalk between the manual track-advance and the one that loads the next song automatically when the current one ends, but I don't think it's a huge problem).

tonight's goal: some simple reactive visuals. I'm thinking I'll separate the landscape into four parallax layers, low frequencies in the distance, higher frequencies whipping past the window? something like that?

ok HUGE UPDATE you are now listening to the album on a minidisc player

ok I actually just ran into a bunch of problems tonight with the way p5js handles sound files. finally got it working though, so, i'll dial in the visuals tomorrow!

eek, forgot to check in tonight! But big good news, it's looking great. Always weird to get that rare reverse 80/20 rule where you work for 80% of the time just grinding for nothing and then it all pays off and comes together in the last 20%

ok calling it a night. got some visuals I'm really excited about, and all the functionality is there. Tomorrow I just have to paint a frame for the train window & make the minidisc player happen.

I'm realizing today how boring this thread is, lol! I want to get better at documenting what I'm working on. Next time I'll take screenshots and share more in-progress builds of things, not just type dry process updates, haha.