This... hoo boy, this is a lot of things.
This is a positivity project inspired by my favorite person. Sometimes we all need a little reminder that we have ways to impact ourselves, or the world, for the better. Even if it's just a little bit. This is a serious of ways to remember that.
This is an experiment in multi-media (in the real sense!) presentations. It is an album, but it is also a visual experience. For that matter, it's a dynamic, interactive, music-and-light extravaganza.
This is a new album from The Good Chemicals, as always made with the aid of computer, but this time in a much more substantive and creative way. It's a collection of nine eight songs with a common thread of a theme between them. (well, except for that ninth one, but I can't really HIDE it from you here)
This is the result of a lot of love and labor and frantic keyboard mashing, and a way for me not only to learn new things as I go along, but to share them with you. I hope we can keep making these better, and keep making new ones, together.
This is a wild swing at the future of entertainment. You can dip in and out with your interactivity, and have more or less control as you see fit, when you're "listening to music". This is not a NEW concept, but it's one I'm trying to refine and master.
Or maybe this is a pretentious programmer making a shiny toddler box of web toys. Can't rule that out either.
This code is the interactive website presentation of the "gizmos" I built to make the songs and videos for the concept "album" ETAOIN SHRDLU. All the songs on the album were tweaked but faithful to their creation by these toys, and all the videos were edited but the footage was sourced almost ENTIRELY from same. It's a bunch of hacky javascript, html, and css, but it gets the job done.
I'll break this down into sections.
From the homepage, click the center box to get an info dialog about the project. The eight boxes around it represent the different works - hover to see the name, hover away to get a hint about the theme and visual style, and click to play that song.
As the bouncing hearts light up, they'll eventually burst into confetti. The lighting is (shh!) controlled by a pair of invisible lines. Press L to make them visible. You can also spawn new hearts with the H key (at a random location) or by clicking (wherever you clicked). There is a cooldown timer on spawning hearts, to prevent the whole thing from going kerblooey.
There's not much to control here when watching. At one point you could enable or diable the various polygons, and the scaffolding of that code is still in there. Truth be told, I played around a lot with ways to make this more interactive but wasn't satisified with anything I had come up with.
Ah, life! Where would we be without it? This step sequencer plays the game of life between every step. The horizontal marker (16 beats) plays the farty trumpet sound, the vertical marker (9 beats) plays the chimes, for each note in a (row/column) as it marches over them. UP and DOWN arrows let you speed up or slow down the music. LEFT and RIGHT change the current key - every 16 beats it changes anyway, but this lets you adapt it on the go. C will clear the grid, and R will randomize it. You can stop and start the playback with SPACE.
Clicking on a grid square will toggle it off or on.
The arrow keys, or L, C, and R for (turn) Left, Center, and Right respectively, will let you decided the next direction the bubble will travel. If you're trying to get it to loop back to the start, continuing straight ahead (whichever direction you are facing) will always get you there sooner rather than later.
There's not much to control here either. This one is kind of a meditation on patience. And if you go diggin in the source, it's also a testament to the beauty of binary. What a nerrrrd, amirite?
Again, this one runs pretty much on its own for now. The tune will likely sound familiar if you can separate a single strand of it - but that's why they are all CONNECT-ed with each other, har har.
No real interactivity here yet - that's still something floating around in my head but I haven't made it there yet. It's akin to an L-System (for my math nerds) but randomized. You can get some REAL pretty flowers out of it, though.
Last one, and this one I DELIBERATELY took out the original interactivity. In fact, this is the one that started the whole project. It's the longest work of the bunch, if you isolate "one cycle" as opposed to the stuff that can repeat forever. It's also the only one with real "lyrics" to it, although some of the others have associated words.
What are you talking about, this doesn't exist. And even if it did, it wouldn't be interactive. And even then, it's not the secret downloadable track on the Bandcamp release. And you CERTAINLY can't go Watch the video.
Glad you asked!
- You can check out the music-only album on BandCamp
- You can watch my gussied-up versions of the videos on YouTube
- You SHOULD be able to view all of these things live at shrdlu.live
- And the... GitHub repo is... here? GitHub
Feel free to email me, or leave a message here, or a comment there, or whatever contact methods you can find. And yes, this is on GitHub specifically so it can remain a work-in-progress perpetually. Who knows what we can make out of this next?
🦥💞🐸