"FEN-Draw Sound" application is designed for non-professional musician or artist. It is a project, which explores the connection between visual and sound. The application allows the user to draw whatever he/she wants and turn it into sound. The connection between sound and visual is the color.

The idea to relate sound to color has more then two hundred years history.  There has been suggested varaity of color mappings of the music scale. Many people argue that is not possible to relate the color to to the sound, since they are different in nature. A relationship between them is always subjective and questionable.But we think that the connection between color and sound should not be understands as an attempt to strictly visualize a matter invisible as sound. What we try to visualize are characteristics of the sound, such as harmony, rhythm, "high-low" pitch, tempo, and at least, but not last, sound is changing in time.We think that the color is more abstract and unifying approach to express the characteristics of the sound. That way, to every color is connected specific note. The pitch is the hue.

fig. 1. The most often proposed mapping is of pitch to hue. 

Here are a few links you should follow, if you would like to see other projects for visual music.
Those projects were our inspiration:
The interface of our application tries to meet the requirements of simplicity. It is divided to "drawing space", "drawing tools" and "playback/menu". The user can change the color (pitch), the stroke (high/low pitch), the transparency of the line. For the prototype we used common piano-sound, but in future we would like to implement a digital sounds. Not everything is finalized still, but we wanted to make very quick prototype and give an impression of how it would work. And short documentation of th testong of our application can be found here. The prototype was developed with Flash and is done by my project-mate, Xiaofen Peng.
In future we will implement all the design functions and transfer it to Android platform.


pic. 1. A screenshot of Draw Sound

This application is designed for a multitouch device in general. In particular, the project was develop on Archos 101 Internet tablet. The display is high resolution multitouch screen and the operating system is Android. We would like to give special thanks to professor K.H. Rödiger for opportunity to use this device.

The project was part of the module "Selected Topics in Interaction Design" (Universität Bremen).
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Team:  Xiaofen Peng (programming) and Toni Andonova (design)
           
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