Students in Osman Khan’s Intro to Computational Media class design a character that responds to sound amplitude.

Based on a Processing workshop developed by Lorenzo Bravi and inspired by the work of Bruno Munari, this assignment asked students to:

1) Design a minimal geometric face, and emphasizing the geometry and patterns of the abstraction, rather than creating a “cartoon” or “illustration.” Students were asked to think about the personality of the character in addition to its ‘appearance’. Students sketched their ideas by hand, then translated the sketches into Illustrator and finally into code.

2) Students were then asked to animate their faces using mouse movements. This also meant rewriting their face code so that the geometry was drawn with variables that corresponded to the coordinates and position of the mouse cursor.

3) The final version of the project replaced mouse movement and used sound as the variable to influence the reactions of the face.  The ‘drawn’ faces respond in real time to amplitudes of sound.