DH Audit - Colors

[christianscarlett]

Colors

Assessment

It seems like the tool just maps color to pitch, and as the color gets brighter the pitch gets higher. There are a number of other parameters that their functions are less clear to me, at least with the interface as-is.

With the current color picker, there are 2 parts to it: the base color slider, and the hue palette. The hue palette has 2 axes: horizontally to choose how much of the base color is present, and vertically to choose the darkness. The base color slider allows you to sample the base color from the spectrum of visible light. All of these parameters serve to adjust the same attribute of the output—the pitch—which is where I think the tool becomes underutilized and a bit confusing to use.

Ideas

Color brightness to pitch was cool, but the only really intuitive part of the tool. I have a couple ideas for how to make the color tool a bit more user-friendly and expand its functionality.

An idea to simplify the user experience is to reduce the number of adjustable parameters and reflect that in the UI. One idea is to have a slider or a set of options for the base color, and another slider that adjusts the darkness/brightness/hue. While the color still doesn’t have that much of an impact on the output, it simplifies the experience for the user to two inputs.

Another way to do this without changing the color picker would be to, on the frontend, have a display of the “value” generated from the amalgamation of inputs that directly relates to the produced sound wave (so the user doesn’t have to press “Update” and play with the instruments to get an idea of what will be produced).

I think to make the color picker a richer experience, we should experiment using different musical attributes for the input parameters. Right now, I’m thinking pitch, timbre/texture, volume/envelope (colors can be described as “loud” sometimes—can we quantify this?). The input parameters we have with the existing UI are base color, brightness, and hue. Perhaps we can change the existing UI to further modularize these concepts, or experiment with the ways these attributes can interrelate.

Note this was all written before digging into the code.