Inspiration
I'm in Dan O's rest of you class. I find text analysis very interesting, so I want to extent on that and use it as a tool to learn about myself. While researching for inspirations, I found art that's generated with message analysis, and moodscape concept. I want to combine these two, and create an audio journal visualizer.
What is it?
Besides writing journal, another way for me to get my thoughts out is to talk to my family, my boyfriend and my close friends. Most times I talk about things I struggle with and vent about my roommates and work. I usually feel a lot better afterwards. I rarely talk about positive things. I'm pretty sure people think I'm pessimistic and cynical.
I want to change that, and try to talk about the positive things more. Even though I feel good after talking about the negative things, it's not a good habit to have. Research shows negative thoughts can have negative impact on mental health and physical health over time. It's difficult to prevent yourself from having negative thoughts because you do that unconsciously. So, I thought it'd be easier to change that if we can visualize our thoughts and feelings. It's like the reasons that every dance studio has big mirrors is so that dancers can see themselves and correct their dance moves and postures.
So, I made this audio journal visualizer. When you speak out loud about your thoughts and emotions, it generates a colorful graphic based on how negative or positive you sound. Warmer colors mean positive words with red being the most positive you speak. Cooler colors mean negative words with dark blue being the most negative word you speak. The visual output is generated simultaneously. It's like art therapy, and very relaxing to look at. I hope this moodscape can help you to be more aware of your thoughts and to cultivate the power of positive thinking.
Process
I had a concept to start with, so I wanted to make a quick prototype for all the pieces that consist in the concept. I made a sketch that's similar to watercolor/ink paintings first. Then, I used mic.getlevel to get values for the volume to control the thickness of the lines. The hardest part was to figure out how to assign colors to each score and how to combine all the code together.
Here're some problems I still need to solve:
As you speak, it keeps drawing lines, but the color doesn't change until you speak another word that has a score.
The graphic is drew differently in present mode and sketch mode. I'm not sure why.
What's next?
We want to do more user testings. Because there's delay when the code is ran every time, I want to have an intuitive way to let users know instead of letting them to read it in a paragraph.
Improve the interface. I want to present it as a fun and educational tool.
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