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Step 6Picking Up the Pieces
Of course, once we broke the box, it meant we were veering off into new territory. And like any new territory, sometimes you get unexpectedly eaten by bears.
There were three major problems we ran into right away:
1.) Pitch shifting was problematic. You probably heard this in the previous clip. We wanted to have something other than just rhythm - a catchy melody of some sort. The problem is, if you're pitch shifting a melody constantly, it starts to sound really irritating - a pleasing melody becomes incredibly annoying when you're constantly messing around with the pitch. Your ear is used to hearing certain intervals as "pleasant" and others as "awful." I believe that's the technical term. And that's when you're dealing with actual notes. Once you start pitch-shifting, you're dealing with intervals between things that are between normal "notes" - the end result is, given the right circumstances, physically repulsive.
What was funny was that for the player, it was a mildly irritating thing - they're occupied playing the game, and since pitch was effectively tied to the physical action of tilting the iPhone, the fact that you'd move your body and the pitch would change "made sense" on some subconscious level. For anyone listening who wasn't playing, though, it sounded *awful*.
2.) Transitions were going to be a problem. We wanted to have the music change every time you picked up or dropped off a fare. With such a discrete event, you couldn't gracefully cross-fade from one track to the other, and if you made a "hard" transition, since you couldn't guarantee that it would happen at the downbeat of a new measure, it sounded really herky-jerky - measures would cut off unexpectedly and restart. Again, to the player, who can see the event that's causing the transition, it's not so bad - but to people who weren't playing, the "stuttering" audio was a mess.
3.) The difference between listening to the audio through the iPhone's headphone jack and through the device's external speakers was ENORMOUS. Things that sounded good on headphones were unintelligible and extremely harsh through the external speakers, and things that sounded good on the speakers were totally imbalanced and "dead" sounding on headphones.
Problems! Argh!
There were three major problems we ran into right away:
1.) Pitch shifting was problematic. You probably heard this in the previous clip. We wanted to have something other than just rhythm - a catchy melody of some sort. The problem is, if you're pitch shifting a melody constantly, it starts to sound really irritating - a pleasing melody becomes incredibly annoying when you're constantly messing around with the pitch. Your ear is used to hearing certain intervals as "pleasant" and others as "awful." I believe that's the technical term. And that's when you're dealing with actual notes. Once you start pitch-shifting, you're dealing with intervals between things that are between normal "notes" - the end result is, given the right circumstances, physically repulsive.
What was funny was that for the player, it was a mildly irritating thing - they're occupied playing the game, and since pitch was effectively tied to the physical action of tilting the iPhone, the fact that you'd move your body and the pitch would change "made sense" on some subconscious level. For anyone listening who wasn't playing, though, it sounded *awful*.
2.) Transitions were going to be a problem. We wanted to have the music change every time you picked up or dropped off a fare. With such a discrete event, you couldn't gracefully cross-fade from one track to the other, and if you made a "hard" transition, since you couldn't guarantee that it would happen at the downbeat of a new measure, it sounded really herky-jerky - measures would cut off unexpectedly and restart. Again, to the player, who can see the event that's causing the transition, it's not so bad - but to people who weren't playing, the "stuttering" audio was a mess.
3.) The difference between listening to the audio through the iPhone's headphone jack and through the device's external speakers was ENORMOUS. Things that sounded good on headphones were unintelligible and extremely harsh through the external speakers, and things that sounded good on the speakers were totally imbalanced and "dead" sounding on headphones.
Problems! Argh!
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