Sounds like Silence.

Sounds like Silence is an interactive project inspired by John Cage's 4'33". His work delves into the concept of how there is no such thing as silence as it is a constant change of sounds around us in our environment. Hence, this project explores the concept of sound through the use of code.

The main idea we had for this project is to utilize the mic function to capture the sounds around us that will translate to various shapes in motion. We also want to include the use of typography into our code as well. When you click over the text "Silence", the text will vibrate to give emphasis on the whole meaning on this project.

Keywords

Silence, Motion, Sound.

Issues encountered

One of the main issues we have encountered was that we were overambitious with how many interactions we wanted to do. We had some difficulty inserting the audio function after we did our text.

Achievements

We managed to include both the text and audio aspects in our code by working from one of the examples given in the exercise.

The sketch

The following sketch was created using the creative coding environment p5js and is called Sounds like Silence, its original source can be found here. A prompt text is given in the code to tell the user what to do. Following the prompt, the user will have to unmute and click on the "silence" text to show the full outcome.

Feedback we received

One of the feedback we have received was that we were overcomplicating things and we should keep it as simple as possible.

Reflection

Overall, this proejct was successful in achieving our initial idea. Along the way, we also made some changes to make the whole interactivity process more fluid and easy for the user. We also hope that this project also achieves through the exploration of code of what the artist also wanted in his work as well.